


The Family Man

by The_Lionheart



Series: Family Matters [1]
Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of battle, Babies, Backstory, Bad Parenting, Brainwashing, Burns, Clint playing Assassin's Creed is my favorite part of this, Cougar!Angrboda, Crazy handsy grandmother, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Family Dynamics, Fanart, Frigga doesn't know how to care for someone who is broken, Grief/Mourning, Hallucinations, Hearing Voices, Implied Character Death, Implied Torture, Imprisonment, Loki Feels, Loki is Santa Claus, Loki is not underage when he sleeps with Angrboda but he is when they first meet, Loki's biological clock is stuck on Earth Time, Loving Marriage, Memory Alteration, Mental Instability, Mutilation, Odin's Bad Parenting, Odin's F- Grandfathering, Pre-christian Scandinavia I guess, Psychological Torture, Self-Destructive sexual risk-taking, Self-Harm, Self-Mutilation, Sexual Experimentation, Shapeshifting, Sharing a Bed, Sleep Deprivation, Starvation, Suicide Attempt, Teen!Loki, Thor is Beowulf, Thor is a "I'm not a racist BUT" Racist, Time passes differently among the realms, Torture, True Love, complicated feelings, everyone fucking needs therapy, good parenting, if you've seen the movie you knew this was coming, living with a parent who has mental illness, mutilation of a corpse, sanity slippage, spoilers for the Avengers: ALL OF THEM, there are no royal therapists in the realm, torture of a child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-04
Updated: 2013-02-14
Packaged: 2017-11-15 15:53:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/528955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Lionheart/pseuds/The_Lionheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Witness the construction and destruction of a heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Loki the Husband

**Author's Note:**

  * For [invictofiction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/invictofiction/gifts), [dragonwrangler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonwrangler/gifts).



He is not yet eighteen when he first runs, when he tires of a brother three years his senior who has nothing in common with him anymore, when he shouts at his father and ignores his mother and packs a small bag and runs.

He runs to Midgard, where he's not the Prince of anything, and he lurks around the edges of a small human village for a few days before he sees her.

She is naked to the waist and standing in the stream, tiny bits of ice floating around her and sticking to the oiled leather boots that rise high above her knees. She is wearing thick trousers made of woven material, and they are a dark, woody green against the freckled brown of her skin. There is a spear in her hand, and she is fishing.

Her hair is wild and a gold so pale it's nearly white, and her eyes are a startling, unnatural silver-blue. She is tall and broad-shouldered, taller than Thor by a head. When she smiles at him, his heart actually stops in his chest.

“You going to stare all day, or will you be making yourself useful?” she teases, and his mouth tries desperately to find some way to impress her.

“I'm Loki,” he says, stumbling over himself to drop his bag in the roots of a tree. “What do you- what do you need me to do?”

“I need nothing,” she replies easily, glancing him over. “But you would win some favor with me cleaning those fish I've caught.”

“I can do that,” Loki grins, looking at the fish. It takes mere seconds for the grin to fade, because he cannot do that. She catches his expression and heaves out a sigh.

“I will be teaching you how to clean the fish shortly, then. Gather some firewood- you can do that, can you not?”

“Yes. Absolutely,” he promises, and marches off to do so. She scoffs at him when he comes back with a small armful, a loose shirt covering her chest and a growing pile of silvery scales on the shore next to her. “Do I need to get more?” he asks, blinking at her face.

“I hesitate to ask, little Loki, but have you ever done a day's work in your life?” she replies, and her mouth twitches into a grin at his silence. “That is no crime. I can teach you that, as well.”

She teaches him how to clean the fish, and he hates it, and does a terrible job until she leans over and finishes it for him.

“You will learn with practice,” she says confidently, and he beams at her. He wants to say something dashing and worldly, something Fandral would say.

“Are you an ice giant?” he asks instead, because he's not Fandral.

“No,” she replies, regarding him curiously. “Giantess.”

“Oh,” Loki says, blinking. “You're an ice giantess?”

“No ice,” she smiles, nudging him with her elbow. “My name is Angrboda.”

She teaches him how to make a fire and how to cook the fish she caught, and playfully asks if he needs any help eating. He doesn't know what to do without so much as a knife or a simple pronged fork, but once he starts eating he doesn't know when to stop. He hasn't eaten much since he left home, just about a meal or two's worth of dried fruit and meat and stale bread that he's stretched out over the last week.

He notices her watching him and feels his face heat under her scrutiny.

“What?” he asks.

“You're very young,” she replies, and he doesn't know what to make of that, and they sit in silence and watch the stars come out. Loki doesn't know these stars, and they fascinate him.

He wakes up and he's wrapped in a pelt, and it's nearly dawn. Angrboda is stamping her feet nearby, and gives him a surprised little smile when she sees him awake.

“I almost thought you'd died in the night, little Loki, your face was so cold.”

“I'm sorry,” he mumbles, rubbing his cheek. She laughs and pats his face, and an electric jolt snaps down his spine at her touch.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

She takes him home to her hut on the outskirts of town, and teaches him how to survive- how to build a fire and find and prepare food, how to skin a rabbit and a deer and how to tan their hides. She teaches him how to sew and how to carve, and celebrates with fresh spring flowers when he discovers a talent for turning wood into intricate little toys and useful tools and furniture. She lets him forgo some of the tasks he does not like to do, at times, and she plays with his hair and calls him her Little Man.

It is over dinner during his sixth week with her that he looks up from his earthy stew and tells her that he's not from Midgard, that he is an Asgardian.

“I know, my pet,” Angrboda responds, her wolf's teeth glinting in the firelight. “Midgard seems to be a place of refuge for strays from other worlds.”

“Are you from Midgard?” Loki asks, and she smiles sadly and brushes the hair from his face.

“No, my pet,” she says, but doesn't say anything more.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He doesn't remember making a decision to stay; she just has so much to teach him. Villagers come to her often- usually humans, but once in a while one of the native trolls- and she births their children and heals their ailments. She teaches him most of what it means to be a midwife and how to help the soft little humans, and laughs at him when he's too shy to make eye contact with the women afterward.

He doesn't remember making a conscious decision to kiss her, early in the fall, and her mouth tastes of the strong dark tea he brews for her.

He remembers the night that he goes to her bed instead of his, and the feel of every part of her, and her mouth against his ear as she asks if she was his first.

In the winter he feels closer to his magic than he has in months, and he practices those things he managed to study, in the dark and on the sly, before he left home and the libraries of Asgard. She is delighted with his talents and rewards him luxuriously. He smiles and she holds him and he thinks that he has finally found his place in the worlds.

In the spring Angrboda becomes moody and distant, and Loki is... surprised, to say the least, when a trio of women arrive on their doorstep, all of them quite visibly Angrboda's relations. The oldest one is withered and stooped under the weight of large antlers, and she reaches around and squeezes his left buttock the moment he opens the door for her.

“Mama, keep your hands to yourself!” Angrboda's mother scolds, and Loki experiences a surreal moment, imagining Frigga cackling in the corner and telling Angrboda that her young man is built to last. Loki is bewildered by the presence of mother, aunt, and grandmother, but he doesn't mind giving up his place in her bed for her mother or his own (abandoned) bed for her other relatives. She has already accused him of doing anything and everything she asks, and this is no exception.

Loki is unable to contain his curiosity, and asks Auntie how they came to this place, if they used the Bifrost to travel. Grand-mama laughs at him and tells him that there are paths between worlds down the branches of Yggdrasil, paths that don't belong to any shining king.

Angrboda's family is sleeping on the third night of their stay when she reaches down to the floor, where Loki is camped out on a bedroll, and runs her fingertips through his hair.

“Loki,” she says quietly, “I'm going to have a baby.”

Loki is stunned, snagging her hand and kissing her knuckles.

“What- that- that's wonderful,” he whispers, sitting up. “When will it get here? Soon?”

She gives him a narrow-eyed look at that, and sighs again.

“There is much I have to teach you yet about where babies actually come from,” she says flatly, and it turns out there is actually quite a lot he didn't know.

There is much to do, but fortunately enough there are several months to do it in. Loki and Auntie expand the hut and build a shed, and widen Angrboda's garden by half. Loki builds a cradle and a sturdy trunk, and when he runs out of things to build he tries to make himself useful around the home.

At the end, that mostly entails curling up at Angrboda's feet to massage her ankles. He has no idea what he's doing or what he ought to be doing, and they're eating a light lunch in the shade near the stream when he leans down and kisses her belly.

“You are a silly little creature,” she complains, but her smile is fond. “What would I do without you to feed my vast and growing ego, my Loki?”

“Would you marry me?” he blurts, not at all how he was planning to ask. “I would like to, but I don't- not unless you want me, and I thought, even if you don't, because the baby, so I-”

“You foolish thing,” she whispers, kissing his forehead. “Of course I will marry you, Loki. You wouldn't survive a winter without me.”

“Oh,” Loki says, blinking. “ _Oh._ Yes. Good.” He grins, slow and dangerous, and starts kissing at the curve of her hip, because she's taught him well.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He does everything he can to be useful, but something's not right. Her mother is fretting and her grandmother is hissing, but all at once there's even more blood than before and there's a baby, and it's such a big baby, he thinks, but of course his mother is a giantess. He double-checks, and yes, it's a boy.

“I have a son,” he murmurs, half to himself, and Auntie barks a laugh.

“You tiny creature, you have two sons,” she says, and he ceases to be useful after that.

They stop batting him away from Angrboda's side, finally, and let him curl up in their bed with her and the twins. She names the skinnier boy Jormundgandr and he names the boy with the full head of hair Fenris. She watches Loki as he gazes at their wriggling little bodies and touches their tummies and their fingers and holds their feet in his hands. He looks up at her, helpless.

“What do I do now?” he asks, awed. “They're everything.”

“Well, yes, my darling,” she answers, smiling.

It is some weeks before Auntie and Mother and Grand-mama decide to leave, and before she goes Grand-mama puts a hand on Loki's head and murmurs softly to herself.

“You have a gift for magic, boy,” she tells him.

“Yes, Grand-mama,” he says obediently.

“You would be a master shapeshifter,” she tells him, “if you would just take the time to learn.”

“Alright, Grand-mama,” he says, less obediently, because who has the time for such things?

“Don't you sass me, foolish child,” she says, but he's reasonably sure that she loves him.

“Sorry, Grand-mama,” he says cheerfully, because he has a wife and two warm little babies waiting for him, and there is work to do and he's the one to do it.

“If you hurt her, I will skin you alive,” she promises, and he shrugs bashfully.

“I would let you,” he admits, and she laughs and kisses the top of his head.

“You are a soft little thing,” she murmurs, and presses him to her bosom. “I would never want to see your edges sharpened.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Loki hovers most of the time; he just doesn't like the idea of either one of his sons leaving his sight, ever. He is on the floor, with two fat little bobble-headed creatures snuffling against his chest.

“Babababa,” Fenris burbles at him, and Jormundgandr keens curiously at the sound of his brother's voice.

“You'll spoil them, Loki,” Angrboda scolds, and he twists his head a little to press a messy kiss against her ankle. She kicks lightly at him, and he grins up at her.

“Good,” he smiles, “let me spoil them. One day our babies will be the kings of Midgard. They'll have to get used to not cleaning fish or working a field when they have millions of servants for that sort of thing.”

“That is the idlest and most idiotic career I can think of,” she replies, kicking him again. “They'll be bored. And lazy. And besides, they're not the Princes of anywhere.”

“They're the Princes of me,” Loki says, wide-eyed and earnest, and Angrboda can't help but laugh at him.

“This is a punishment for some great crime in a past life,” she snickers, “that I would be saddled with three infants for the price of one.”

“Naaannnggaha,” Fenris says seriously, and mashes his fist into his mouth.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The boys are two and prone to removing their clothes at a moment's notice. Loki is pretty sure they're cleverer than any of the other village children. Angrboda is pretty sure Loki has never spent more than a handful of hours with any of the other village children.

Loki almost forgets Asgard. He can recall it in the broadest of terms- towers of gold and jeweled skies and opulence and finery. It seems distant from the wooden hut and simple meals and nights with aggressive toddlers clambering into bed. He catches himself working with his hands and thinking that he can't actually imagine Thor mending a shirt, or Odin's hands mashing roots into mush for the children. He can't imagine either of his parents smiling and nodding and letting his neighbors dominate the conversation until all gossip has been shared.

Angrboda is pregnant again- on purpose, this time, but her mother can't come to visit. There is a shroud obscuring the paths between worlds, and they are on their own. It bodes ill, but Loki remains cheerful, and is a fairly capable midwife in his own right.

Loki is milking the goats, entertaining a fantasy of turning them into dinners and boots, when a traveler shrouded in gray comes up to him.

“I have traveled long and far,” the old man says, and Loki dips his shoulder in a shrug.

“Wait a while, grandfather, and you might share a dinner with me and mine,” he says cheerfully.

“I'm not here for dinner, Loki,” the old man says, and all at once he is golden and shining and deeply disappointed. Loki had forgotten the way shame squirms through his chest, had forgotten the way it steals the air from his throat.

“Father,” Loki says, swallowing once and continuing his work. The goats must be milked, and they will wait for no one. “How are you and Mother these past three years?”

“We are well,” Odin says, peering down at the goats, at the hut, at Loki's life. “I have come to take you home. This is beneath one of your upbringing.”

“This is my home,” Loki says, and is grateful that his voice does not tremble. “It suits me. I have a fine wife and good children.”

“Sons?” Odin asks, curious.

“Twins,” Loki clarifies, and Odin's eyebrows raise a bit.

“And another soon,” he adds, and Odin's eyes narrow.

“You may bring your mortal family to Asgard, if that will bring you home,” he says.

“We're _happy_ here,” Loki mutters, looking down. “I'm not leaving them, and they are not welcome in your house. We're not going to Asgard.”

“Why would they not be welcome in my house, Loki?” Odin asks, but his tone is mocking. “Is it because you have mated with a beast to produce monsters?”

“Leave,” Loki hisses, jumping to his feet. “You will not speak of my family this way.”

“You may have five more years of this depravity,” Odin growls into his son's face. “Five more years of bedding down with a giant and raising its brood, and no more.”

“I hope I never see you again, _Father_ ,” Loki snarls. “Goodbye.”

“It pains me to see you reduced to this state,” Odin says, and he looks hurt, he looks like he means it. “I love you, but this atrocity cannot continue.”

“I love my wife and I love my boys,” Loki says, through gritted teeth. “I will not leave them, now or in five years or in fifty. I love them and I am theirs.”

“The crone's thrall on you will end,” Odin promises, “and we will take you home to Asgard, where you belong.”

Loki throws the bucket of milk, but Odin is gone before it can hit him, and the milk is seeping into the ground. Loki buries his face in his hands and weeps furiously, smothering his mouth with the crook of his arm. When he finally leads the goats into the shed and walks back to the house, Angrboda is quiet and tense, and the boys are watching him curiously.

“I need some help,” Loki says hoarsely. “I need two little boys to keep my chest warm. Who here can help me?”

The boys clamor at his knees to be picked up, and crow triumphantly as they nuzzle against his neck.

When they are asleep, Angrboda coddles him in her arms and strokes his hair back from his forehead and tells him all the reasons why she loves him.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

There is a blight on the land all around the village. Crops die, and animals flee, and Fenris, ever the more vocal of the twins, wakes up crying in the night for something to eat. Jormundgandr merely wakes up, and watches his father and sucks on his fingers until they wrinkle in his mouth.

Panic closes an icy hand around Loki's heart with each passing day. He hunts rabbits and squirrels until they disappear from the forest near home, and he comes home and mends clothing and builds tools and trinkets for villagers until they all, eventually, turn him away, their eyes sad but unable to part with what little they have left.

Angrboda closes a hand around his wrist and asks him, gently, when he last had rest.

“I'll sleep,” he promises, not meeting her eyes. “Soon. There's a few deer left in the woods near us. We could smoke the meat and it would last us a few weeks.”

She frowns and examines his arm, the prominent bones of his wrist, carding her fingers through thinning hair, and asks him what he last ate.

“I'll sleep,” he repeats, pulling away. “It's fine. We can't spare it right now, love.”

“We can't spare _you_ , my foolish little husband,” she tells him, and he hunches his shoulders and drinks some broth, and it's not worth the guilt when Fenris cries himself to sleep.

Loki takes to mending nets for some of the older fishermen in the village, and they pay him with salmon and broken nets. It's tedious and arduous in turns, untangling knots and cutting frayed ends and splicing nets together until they're a patchworked whole. He sits long hours in the yard after the goats have been tended to, working by firelight and moonlight.

Angrboda wakes up one morning and is shocked and appalled to see that he hasn't come in to bed yet. She stumbles outside, mindful of the boys, and almost calls out to him. The words die in her throat as she realizes that he is bent in a nearly fetal position, rocking rapidly in place. She hurries to his side and sinks her fingers into his hair, and takes a deep breath before speaking.

“Husband,” she says gently, reaching down to pry his knife from his unresisting fingers. It's the knife he uses to mend the nets and carve toys for their children, and it's wet and sticky and red all over. “Loki. Look at me.”

He moves sluggishly at first, his gaze distant even as he tries to focus on her face. “Don't know what to do,” he croaks, letting her pull him to his feet. “M'not good enough. They're _dying_.”

“They may and they may not,” she tells him, letting him lean on her as they walk. “You must remain strong if you wish for the former. You must try not to blame yourself if the worst happens. It's not your fault, darling.”

“It is,” he sighs, letting her manhandle him into a chair, his limbs boneless as she cleans the blood and dresses his wounds. “Should protect them. And you.”

“You're doing a marvelous job, Princeling,” she promises, and leads him to their bed. Jormundgandr noses his way out of the blankets and curls up against Loki's chest, and he sleeps, at last, with his child in his arms.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It's a small number of small things that end this time of torment. Loki starts altering nets instead of mending them outright, and starts fishing further downstream, after the stream becomes a small river. He comes home with bleeding fingers every night, but he catches much more salmon than he did before, and the twins start putting some weight back on. He even starts taking regular meals, and Angrboda doesn't bother to hide how relieved she is.

Hela is born in the summertime, with scraggly tufts of black hair and pale green eyes. The boys take turns in holding her with exaggerated care, curled up in Angrboda's lap in a pile.

For the first time in the six months since his father's visit, Loki smiles.


	2. Loki the Father

Hela is three and her brothers are five, and Loki has spent all of twenty-three years in this lifetime, and the past six have been the good ones.

Loki makes a habit- a silly one, but Angrboda can't find it in her to discourage him- of building toys for other children in the village. He likes to wait until the winter solstice, because then everyone is gathered together, and gives them out. He tries to use it as a teaching moment for the boys, but they just like pushing toys into other children's hands and then taking those children off to play elaborate games. As far as Loki can tell, these games consist of chasing one another through the village green and hitting each other with the toys. His boys are very clever and he is very proud.

Another wonderful thing about the winter is that it is when Angrboda's relatives come for their annual visits. Grand-mama stays longest, because she says Loki is very bad at teaching the children, and all four of them learn shapeshifting together. She instructs them to meditate on their preferred other forms, and the twins are the first to find themselves. Boisterous and playful, Fenris becomes a wolf pup, and he barks and howls and chases his own tail, and Loki privately thinks he takes altogether after his Uncle Thor. Being much shyer and quieter, it surprises no one when Jormundgandr becomes a supple green snake and then spends the entirety of an evening curled bashfully up in his mother's shirt, peeking his narrow little head out every few moments to taste the air and tell Fenris not to laugh at him.

Hela is problematic, because when she tries to transform it comes out wrong, a mishmash of different skins and furs and feathers, and Loki soothes and her rocks her to sleep as Grand-mama changes her back. It may be difficult or even impossible for Hela to find a comfortable other body in which to reside, but Grand-mama assures everyone that it is merely the fact that Hela's spirit is more invested in things beyond the realm of the physical, and that she would make a fine witch if her father ever got around to practicing his witchcraft.

Hela is problematic, but Loki is worse. When he shapeshifts he finds that forms slip from his grasp, elude him. He becomes a doe and just as quickly becomes an eagle and his feathers are barely visible before they are scales, and within moments he is shivering and shapeless and barely has the strength to remember who or what he truly is. Both Grand-mama and Angrboda are needed to talk him down from this terrifying, amorphous state, and when he is finally solid again he has waist-length hair and breasts. It is some time before Loki is comfortable enough to try to shift back into a male form, and Grand-mama is deeply concerned for him, but whenever he asks her what it means she just pats his cheek and tells him he's a good boy, and not to worry overmuch.

She does not tell him that as a doe and an eagle and a salmon and last, when the undefined blur of consciousness still had color in it, he was a dark, icy blue with brilliant crimson eyes. She remembers the last Great War, and she remembers how many Asgardians and Jotuns both took captive “brides” and produced offspring throughout the realms with hybrid blood. She knows he is of Asgard and she knows how a long and bloody campaign warps one culture's perception of the other, and she knows that _he does not know_.

It seems harmless to merely soothe his worries and encourage him to practice shifting between sexes in the species he is most familiar with, and to practice fine-tuning the minute details that define individuals. She does not miss that in his moment of refuge, the form he finally settled into was startlingly similar to Angrboda- shorter and slighter, perhaps, and differently colored, but with similar enough features to look more than just related.

She does not know how to warn him against investing so much of himself, of his identity, in other people, but that is not a matter for witchcraft or shapeshifting, and she finds herself putting it off until the children are a little older and Loki is a little more sure of himself and a little less likely to take such criticism as an attack.

It seems so little a thing, she decides, watching him lavish affection on his wife and children. Some of his edges are broken and some are ragged and raw, but none of them are sharp and she thinks that as long as he has no reason to sharpen, the most damage he might do is to himself. She thinks he would die before hurting any one of them, and suspects that he would kill anyone who tried to do so.

She does not allow herself to imagine what he would do if he lost one or some or all of them, because that, then, would be a horror.

She loves him, and watches him carefully, but never sees any sign of danger in him.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“It seems it is time for me to leave,” Grand-mama says sternly.

“It seems it is,” Loki giggles, and Grand-mama's sack giggles suspiciously as well. She hefts it onto her back, the extra weight of three naughty children warm against her shoulderblades.

“Where oh where are my great-grandchildren, Loki?” she asks, and he is laughing too hard to answer, so Angrboda answers for him.

“I suspect those three bad children are off having an adventure without us, Grand-mama!” she says, elbowing Loki.

“Perhaps you should f-f-find them,” Loki suggests, burying his face in Angrboda's side. Sighing heavily, Grand-mama stalks outside, swinging the weight of the sack a little bit. She makes it all the way into the village, a common enough visitor there that most of the villagers greet her with a polite and proper, “Good morning, Baba.”

She stops at a trading post, and gives the merchant there an exaggerated wink as the children snicker loudly from inside her bag. He grins up at her, nodding.

“What may I help you with, Baba Yaga?” he asks smoothly, patting the sack on someone's head- probably Fenris, who's taller. “Here to sell this sack full of things, are you?”

“That I am,” Grand-mama says loudly, and the children clamber out, wailing that they don't want to be sold, they want to go on an adventure with her. The merchant chuckles at their overwrought display and Grand-mama gives them all kisses and honeyed flowers to nibble, and carries the three of them home for one last goodbye before she finally departs for home.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It is Hela's fourth birthday. The very concept of celebrating or keeping track of birthdays is completely alien to Loki, but he takes to it with somewhat horrifying enthusiasm.

Angrboda tries to gently explain to him that Hela is turning four, not fourteen. She won't remember that he painstakingly gathered flowers for hours and arranged them in groups of four, and she won't remember exactly what sort of candies and treats he plied her with. It's been the same story ever since the twins turned one- Loki goes above and beyond reasonable expectations, to a degree that annoys and exasperates, but something is different this year. He's nervous and twitchy, and the children are _noticing_.

Loki is out fishing when Fenris looks up at her and asks her, quietly, if Daddy is sick. Angrboda winces and tries to think of a way to rationalize his increasingly erratic behavior to a boy of nearly six.

“Daddy's not sick,” Jormundgandr pipes up, wiping his nose on his sleeve. Angrboda blinks at him, and he shrugs. “Sick is if you're in bed and you can't do nuffin. Daddy's not sick. His insides are broken.”

Angrboda counts silently to ten before giving the children a smile and distracting them with a story. When Loki gets home they cook the family's meal together, and it's only later, when the children are fast asleep, that Angrboda takes Loki outside and asks him what has possessed him to act like this in front of the children.

The discussion escalates into an argument, and her worry for her husband's state of mind whips her annoyance and concern into full-blown anger. They have the first real fight they've ever had, Loki defensive and deflecting against her frustrated interrogation. Angrboda has never raised her voice to this level before, and she breaks herself off mid-sentence when she realizes that Loki is backed against the wall of their shed, eyes on the ground between his feet.

“Loki,” she snaps, and she comes closer and realizes that he's shaking. She takes a few breaths to steady herself, even though she's still angry with him. “Loki. Will you not look at me?”

“I'm sorry,” he says quietly, and his gaze remains transfixed on the ground. “I- I'll try harder, I _promise_. Don't cast me out, Boda, please don't. I'll try harder.”

“Loki,” she exhales, gently taking his arm. “Loki, please look at me. I'm not casting you out. I wouldn't. I love you, Loki, I just...” He still won't look at her, and she wants to turn around and let him come to his senses on his own. She pulls him closer instead, because she still vividly remembers the last time he was left alone with the spectre of failure. “You're worrying me, and you're worrying the children. We don't need some false idea of perfection, my little prince. We just need you, and nothing more. You don't need to suffer this tension for our sake.”

“I just,” Loki begins, and she takes it as a good sign that he rests his head on her shoulder. “I just want Hela to feel special. I'm frightened that I'm going to do something wrong and then they'll grow up feeling like I don't love them, and, and I love them _terribly_ , Boda.”

“Oh, dearest, why would you ever think that?” she chides, but she knows that she's never been introduced to a single one of his relations in the entire time that she's known him. “We all know that you love us. It is written in our bones.”

She holds him in a tight embrace for a moment, kissing his forehead. “Let us both come inside now, before the villagers come round asking to know why Ragnarok has begun without them.”

They go to bed and she wraps around him, and he makes a soft sound and gradually relaxes in her arms. She is worried still, and watches him until she is sure he is deeply asleep and dreaming. Even then, she only dozes. It is a good thing that she does, because he starts having a nightmare, whimpering softly and trying to curl up into the smallest shape he can manage.

“Don't,” he cries, and she shushes him and rubs his side. “Five more years, just five, _please_ -”

“Hush now,” she murmurs, and presses herself against his back and kisses his neck. “You're alright, love, you're safe. Hush.”

Angrboda knows it's been nearly five years since the visit from the horrible old man who she knows is Loki's father, even if he refuses to speak of that day. She knows, and she curses that old bastard in her heart for causing this distress. Eventually Loki quiets again, and in sleep he looks so very like the teenager she first met, the one who was scared and homeless and lost and altogether too easily swayed by the merest hint of kindness.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“There is a visitor in the village today,” Angrboda remarks casually. “I saw him at the great hall.”

“How exciting,” Loki says, a beat too late. “Was he- what did he look like?”

“Young,” she reassures him, and he breathes out a sigh of relief. “He had no glamour on him, although he did carry a magical weapon of some kind. I did not see what it was.”

“That is uncommon,” Loki says, squinting. “What else?”

“Tall for a man. Taller than you, certainly,” she adds, teasing. “Wearing armor that looks far too new and a crimson cape that looks far too clean.”

Loki pauses what he's doing, looking distant for a moment before putting a bowl of cooked fish and broth in front of Hela.

“That... that is nice,” he says blankly, licking his lips nervously. “We should... we should eat quickly, and go to bed, also quickly.”

“Alright, my love,” Angrboda says, looking down at her food. “He mentioned he was on a quest to find a great nocturnal dragon living in or near the lake. I'm sure he'll have left by now, it's nearly dark.”

Loki smiles wanly at her, and does his level best to eat his food as quickly as possible. It's not quick enough, though, because quite soon there is a rapping on the wall near the door that makes the foundation of the hut tremble.

“Good people!” a booming voice proclaims. “I seek refuge, and I can see that you are not yet retired to sleep by the light of your fire!”

“Well who _would_ be, after that,” Jormundgandr mutters under his breath, and Loki turns a sickly grey.

“I'll get the door,” Angrboda offers, and when she opens it she can see it is indeed the visitor from town. He tosses wild golden hair out of his eyes and gives her a leer.

“I remember you,” he says, but then his eyes travel past her bosom and into the main room of the hut. He blinks, his entire face changing into something a little less obnoxious. “Loki! What are you doing here?”

“I am eating dinner,” Loki says softly, standing up. “But we have enough to feed another, and room to let you stay a night, if you need to for your-”

“Nonsense!” the visitor interrupts, and Angrboda thinks this man may be likeable enough, but she does not at all like the effect he has on her husband. “Come here!”

Loki wilts visibly, raking a hand through his hair as he walks over to him. “Of course. Children, please be polite and say hello to your Uncle Thor.”

Thor blinks several times, before swooping in and crushing Loki in a hug. “You sly dog, I thought you were off having one of your sulks!”

“For seven years, Thor?” Loki asks wearily, and Thor grins and turns toward Angrboda. She pats him on the head in lieu of enduring one of those hugs. He gets down on one knee and looks expectantly at the children, who frown slightly at the thought of being affectionate with a total stranger. Angrboda sighs and gives them a surreptitious nod in Thor's direction, and they sigh and march over for hugs.

She puts a hand at the small of Loki's back, and he jumps slightly at her touch. They exchange a brief, pained little smile, before Thor roars unhappily at Loki.

“Brother! You have never told my niece and nephews the story of how our Mother single-handedly slew an army of Shoggoths?” Thor cries, and Loki winces.

“No, because that story is actually very violent _and inappropriate_ for children of this age-” he begins.

“I shall remedy this! Gather close, small ones,” Thor begins, and Angrboda can actually see the migraine forming in Loki's skull. It's a low-level headache that doesn't go away once in the entire three-day span of Thor's visit- Loki does keep trying to remind him of his quest for the lake-monster, and Thor happily replies that the monster will keep. Loki thinks not hurrying out to dispatch the murderous beast you've sworn to kill is a bit irresponsible, but the children quickly warm up to Thor and, frankly, adore him after the end of the third story. (Hours and hours past their bedtimes, in case anyone cared.)

When Thor finally does leave on the fourth morning, he pulls Loki into another hug, but gentler.

“It would do Mother some good to see you,” he says, and Loki winces.

“We did not part on the best of terms, Thor,” he tries, and Thor punches him in the arm, just a shade too hard.

“She misses you, and I miss you,” Thor declares, blinking. “It injures me to know that you did not even try to let me know that you'd married and had children, Brother. And I know Mother would love her grandchildren, even though they are- well, halfbreeds,” he adds, shrugging.

“I do beg your pardon, but I believe it is high time for you to leave,” Loki says sternly. Thor looks at him for a moment, his smile fading a little.

“I did not mean to offend, Loki,” he says softly, rolling his eyes. “Of course I love your children as well, and your wife is a treasure, a goddess among her race-”

“Please just stop talking and leave,” Loki moans, putting his face in his hands. “Take care that you do not injure yourself overmuch on this quest, Thor, I would hate to tell my poor innocent babies that their new favorite person has died in a lake.”

“Nay, that would be terrible. Tell them I died in a tremendous fire,” Thor grins, and he gives Loki one last hug. “I am surprised but pleased that you are happy, Loki,” he breathes into Loki's hair, and then he is gone, following Mjolnir through the skies.

Nearly a fortnight goes by before they see Thor on their front doorstep, burdened by the rotting, mangled corpse of the serpentine beast. Jormundgandr takes one look at it and dives under his bed to cry.

Thor is not allowed in the house besmirched so with gore, and he blows kisses at Loki's family and gives them one last goodbye before he leaves.

It worries Loki that there is apparently a Bifrost site quite close to his village, but there is nothing he can do about it. That, too, worries him.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Daddy, what's the moon made of?” Hela asks sleepily. He presses a kiss into her hair, rubbing her back. It's a pretty night and no one wants to sleep, the boys and Angrboda are off to one side of the garden play-fighting, and Hela began the night with lots and lots of questions about the stars overhead , and Loki has an old blanket spread out on the ground beneath them.

“Predominantly rock, coated with a layer of fine, reflective dust that catches the light of the sun and angles it back toward us,” he murmurs, and she pokes a finger up his nose. He removes it gently. “Why do you ask, my little snowflower?”

“Gunnarr says it's a boat that carries a big glowing jewel,” she yawns.

“Gunnarr's father is not as educated in the ways of the cosmos as your father is,” he replies. “It is a giant rock that orbits the planet we are on.”

“Oh,” Hela says, inspecting her finger. Loki tries not to grimace as he cleans her hand. “Why does it get smaller and bigger, Daddy?”

“Because as it moves, so do we. When we are turning from its glowing face, we see less of it.” Loki brushes her hair back. “It never truly gets bigger or smaller, dear. We just happen to be looking at it from the wrong direction.”

“Oh,” Hela says again, and she puts something that Loki sure _hopes_ is a flower inside his shirt. “Gunnarr says it gets eaten by a wolf, and that makes it smaller.”

“First of all, my darling, that makes no sense because a wolf is far too intelligent to eat a rock,” he says, and she giggles at him. “You don't believe me? Because I have some rocks and Fenris is looking awfully hungry...”

“Daddy, no, don't feed Fenna rocks,” she scolds, and he pouts at her.

“Very well, precious. And the second reason that theory makes no sense is that it does not account for the moon getting larger again later in the month,” Loki points out. “What does Gunnarr say to that?”

“Gunnarr's dog eats its own vomit and also its own droppings,” Jormundandr pipes up, slithering onto Loki's chest. “I seen it lots of times.”

“...let us all just agree that Gunnarr's dog is foul, and that Fenris is going to be on weeding duty forever if I ever hear tell of his doing such a thing,” Loki promises.

“What such of a thing?” Fenris demands, bounding over and trampling over some herbs as he does. “Am I in trouble? It was Jori, I didn't do it!”

“What,” Angrboda asks suspiciously, looming overhead.

“What,” Loki agrees, raising his eyebrow at the boys.

“What?” the twins ask in unison, _far_ too innocently to be genuine.

“And now we're going to have a family discussion,” Angrboda announces grimly, and the boys whine- Fenris literally, his tail drooping.

Hela is already asleep, and Loki winks at his wife and carries their daughter inside. He tucks her into the blankets of the small trundle that pulls out from under his and Angrboda's bed, and she grabs some of his shirt in her tiny hand.

“Yes, dear?” he asks softly.

“Daddy, don't go,” she murmurs, her eyes half-closed. “I hadda dream that you left us.”

Loki blinks, and curls up on the ground next to her bed and pats her arm. “I would never.”

“You left us and we were in a dark place,” she tells him sadly, clutching his hand. “And it was scary and Mama was hurt and when you came back you were somebody else.”

“Never never never, darling,” Loki whispers, his heart in his threat. “Never would I ever leave you, Hela. If you went to a scary dark place I would go there _with_ you, sweetheart.”

“Uncle For and his friends were with you,” she yawns, and he lays his head down next to hers to watch her. “And you were a bad prince, and you forgot us.”

“That's a silly dream,” Loki says, choking back the urge to cry like a baby. “You are everything to me. I would never ever _ever_ forget you, Hela.”

“You came back for us but you were different,” Hela sniffles into his hair. “And you and the big green man were crying.”

“It was just a dream, baby,” Loki tells her, cuddling her close. “Dreams aren't real. This is real- I am here with you and your brothers and Mama, and I'll always be your Daddy. Yes?”

She doesn't answer; she is fast asleep. Loki stays with her until his back screams at him, and then Angrboda helps him into bed.


	3. Loki the Son

Loki is fishing in a cold, lively little river- the same one he first met Angrboda in, as a matter of fact- when there is a crunching of leaves and underbrush and Odin steps out onto the banks of the stream. Loki does not let himself startle. There are fish to catch and his children are growing, but he does acknowledge his father with a tilt of his head.

“I wondered when I would see you,” Loki murmurs, selecting a few smaller fish and some plant matter to toss aside before moving on. “Thor seems in good health.”

“You know your brother, always in a better humor after he's spent some time on an adventure,” Odin says, stepping forward. “Loki, come with me.”

“No,” Loki says pleasantly. He selects a dozen of the largest fish and sets them aside, packing the rest into some salt in a leather sack. “I have to clean these salmon, and I was going to smoke the meat later. If you wish to stay and talk, though, I can do that while I work.”

Odin is quiet for a moment, and then- wonder of wonders- he sits down on the bank, watching Loki as he cleans the fish and tries not to feel like his skin is crawling off his bones.

“Loki,” Odin says, and he almost sounds gentle. “I want you to understand that your mother and I love you very much. I want you to understand that we only want what's best for you.”

“I am grown,” Loki says carefully, his worn knife flashing in the firelight. “I appreciate your concern, Father, but I am grown and I am happy.”

“I know that, Loki,” Odin says, sighing heavily. “I did not want to believe that you could find happiness so far from home, but I am... glad. I'm glad that you were able to find a measure of joy and peace here on Midgard.”

“Yes,” Loki replies, looking over at his father. “It's... it's good here. I have a family who loves me.”

“You have that on Asgard,” Odin says quietly.

“I know,” Loki says, even though he doesn't really. “I just... I have two sons and a daughter, and I will do anything for them. I have a wife and I would do anything for her, as well. I love them with the entirety of my heart, Father.”

“That is... that is good to hear,” Odin says, looking away. “Loki, I do not question your choice to live here on Midgard, and I do not question your love for your wife and children. You are a good boy and a good father, and I am glad to see it.”

“But?” Loki prompts, frowning.

“Your mother and I are not comfortable with this woman who has preyed on you since you were still a child,” Odin says flatly.

“She never preyed on me,” Loki says, scowling. “She helped me survive, she taught me how to thrive here, and she gave me a home when I had nowhere else to go.”

“You could have come to us,” Odin cuts in. “You always had us.”

“I ran _from_ you,” Loki hisses. The smoke from the fire is tingling in the back of his throat, and he clears it a little. “I ran from you, and when I stopped running she was kind to me.”

“I believe she has spelled you,” Odin says. “I know your feelings are genuine, Loki, because you have a good heart underneath everything else, but the object of your affections was forced upon you through her dark magic.”

“I am not enthralled,” Loki snaps. “I am myself, and have been these past years. And you know as well as I do that no spell, no matter how powerful, could have held my loyalty for so many years.”

“It didn't need to hold your loyalty once she started giving birth to your children,” Odin says wearily. “Loki, you are and have always been soft. Easy. Too prone to see a gesture and not the motives behind it.”

“I will not stand for another word against her, Odin,” Loki growls. “My father you may be, but you are not my king upon this soil, and I will not stand to listen to another word against the honor of my wife.”

“Loki-” Odin pauses, sighing. “If you would just come to Asgard with me, you would understand. The last traces of her magic would fall from your mind, and you would breathe clearly again.”

“The only magic between us is the depth of our love,” Loki says frostily, before coughing at the harsh smoke of his fire. “I realize this is hard for you to understand, but there is nothing in all the nine realms worth losing them. My only hope is to live to see my children's children, and to watch them all thrive.”

“Loki, surely you can see that you are not speaking as yourself,” Odin pleads. “You would give up your brother? You would give up everything you hold precious on Asgard? You would leave the ruling of my kingdom to Thor, and die of infirmity centuries before any of us?”

“You're always welcome to visit us,” Loki says, coughing again. He glares at his fire, which has nearly died down to nothing. “Where is all this damned smoke _coming_ from?”

“Loki,” Odin sighs, standing. “I am so sorry, my son.”

“What are you-” Loki pauses, looking over at Odin, terror gripping his heart. “What have you done?”

“I did not watch you, I did not keep my sight on this corner of Midgard,” Odin says sadly, and Loki cannot breathe at all. “By the time I turned my gaze toward your village, it was already too late.”

“I don't understand,” Loki says, his knuckles white around the handle of his knife. “My village was- it's fine. I was there this morning.”

“And now it is dusk, Loki,” Odin says quietly. “And the wind has only just started blowing in this direction.”

“I-” Loki drops the fish, drops the knife, because the smoke isn't from his fire at all, and he jumps to his feet. “No. _No_.”

“Loki-!” Odin calls out, but Loki is running, and his legs are not fast enough and a part of him is dimly aware that he has become a horse, thundering faster than he ever has gone before, and a part of him thinks _I must tell Baba that I've finally done it_ , and most of him is blank, most of him is holding its breath.

He reaches the village first, tumbling back into his human shape, and what he sees drives panic through his skull. The houses are burnt-out wrecks of themselves, charred bodies are scattered everywhere. He sees the heads of several men mounted on wooden stakes, and he even sees a few survivors, huddling together in the trees beyond.

“Loki!” Gunnar cries, running towards him with his dog limping behind. Loki scoops him up, looking for and failing to find Gunnar's parents. “Loki, strangers came! In armor, and they had these things, and there was fire-”

“Hush,” Loki murmurs, putting Gunnar down and running a hand over his head. “Where were you hiding, Gunnar? Is my family there with you?”

“No,” Gunnar says, his face scrunching up. “There's only six of us, Loki-”

Loki's heart stops and he turns and pays Gunnar no more heed after that, although Gunnar would always tell stories of him afterward- Loki who became a horse, Loki who fathered many strange children, Loki who dove into fire. Eventually others would take these stories and shape them to their own lives, and still others would change them into stories of a man who became a horse that bore a colt, of a god of fire who sprang up when lightning struck.

Gunnar never has the vocabulary, never has the language he needs to ever fully explain what he means by _strangers in armor_ , and in time his childish memory fades enough that he can almost believe that those strangers looked human.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The house Loki shared with Angrboda has been burned to the ground. It is black ash, nothing recognizable, but Loki knows from the memory of his heart that there is where his garden was, and that was the shed where he stored his tools and kept his animals in the winter, and this place was once a solid wall against the spot where he and Angrboda slept, and there is nothing but ash and burning wood here.

That does not stop him from throwing himself into the wreckage that was his home, digging bare-handed until the skin of his fingers splits open and turns black from the heat, until splinters and jagged shards of burnt timber bury themselves in his palms and wrists. He can hear someone screaming, he can hear someone screaming the names of his children, and he will not stop, he cannot stop digging for them, because it is unfathomable that he may not find them- hurt, perhaps, and certainly filthy, but they would be alive. They should be alive. They need to be alive, _please be alive_ , please let them be alive.

There is a moment when his mind shatters. There is a moment when he digs and finds bone, he digs and finds a perfect ribcage, soot-colored and blisteringly hot, and it is small enough to be held in his two hands, and after that moment Loki does not remember anything, at all, for hours.

It is dawn before he comes back to himself. He is lying facedown in the cooling ash, cradling the ruins of his hands against his chest, his eyes and lungs burning.

There is a figure near him, and she is speaking, and it takes Loki a while to focus his bleary gaze on her features enough to recognize her.

“Baba,” he whimpers, and her gnarled hand brushes the hair from his face, before she kneels down to help get him upright enough to sit.

“Princeling,” she says softly, her hands on his shoulders. “Come away from this place with me, Loki. This is not where you want to be right now.”

“Kill me,” Loki tells her, and she bows her head a little. “Baba, you _said._ You said you'd kill me. Look at what's happened. You have to kill me. You have to.”

“Oh, Loki. I cannot kill you,” she sighs, reaching up to wipe soot and tears from his face. “Listen to me, please. This was not your doing. I do not blame you.”

“It's my fault,” Loki whispers, slapping her hand away. “I should have- I should have been there. I should have never left. I could have done something, and I did not, and they are dead.”

“There is nothing you could have done, you silly boy,” she hisses, catching his wrists in her hands. “Loki! It is not your fault. Please, please come with me now. You must not be here any longer, Loki. I fear for your life if you stay here, please-”

“My life?” Loki asks harshly, and a hysterical grin slashes across his face. “My life is nothing. My life is worthless. Take it, kill me, I don't want it, I don't want to be alive if they are not-”

“Stop _saying_ that,” she cries, because she sees the desperation in the man who fathered her great-grandchildren, and she is afraid of losing any more of her loved ones tonight. “Loki, stop it-”

“Kill me, you bitch,” Loki shrieks, struggling to free himself, but she- like Angrboda- is bigger, has always been stronger, and the longer she holds him down the more frantic he becomes. “Kill me, I have nothing else, I want nothing else but for you to hold to your promise and end me.”

“I cannot,” Baba Yaga sighs, and he bursts into bitter tears. “I must bury my grandchild, and her children. Do not ask me to bury a son, Loki, do not.”

“I can't,” he sobs, and she cradles him close, but is not foolish enough to let go of his wrists. “I can't, not without them, I can't, Baba, _I can't_ -”

“You can, and you must,” she tells him, tears streaming down her wrinkled face. “Loki, dearheart, this is not something you should have ever seen, and my heart aches. Please, Loki. Come home with me, and we will mourn together.”

Loki chokes back a sob and without thinking he changes, transforms into a snake and escapes her grip, and he slithers away but only for a moment, because he is a snake and he thinks _Jori_ and it's far too painful, and he becomes a wolf and runs long enough for his mind to betray him again, _oh my baby_ , and he becomes a horse and runs and runs and runs. He comes to a mighty river and dives in, becoming a salmon, and when he is caught a few miles upstream he struggles and a part of him is perversely happy, a part of him wants it.

Warm, bare hands close around his sides, and he is changed against his will, he is Loki once more, shivering and wet in Odin's arms on the banks of a stream.

Odin is murmuring into his ear, but Loki does not hear the words, only closes his eyes and tumbles into sleep.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Loki does not know how long he sleeps in the care of the healers on Asgard, just that he wakes up and Thor is there, one hand heavy on his arm above the bandages that stop near the elbow.

“Hello again, brother,” Thor says kindly, and Loki starts crying. Neither of them speaks again, and when Loki is done with crying he stares blankly at the wall until his eyes seem to close of their own accord, and Thor never leaves him.

Time passes strangely. Loki is aware that one day his hands are in pain and wrapped in bandages, and that another day passes and his hands are clean and lightly scarred but otherwise perfect. He usually sees Thor when he is awake, and sometimes Mother is with him and sometimes she is alone, her eyes red and her head bowed.

Loki does not speak, not ever, even when Mother is holding him and crying into his hair, even when Thor is speaking to him with exaggerated care about this and that.

One day Loki wakes up alone, for the first time since he came here, and Odin walks into the room.

“Father,” Loki rasps, his throat sore with disuse.

“My son,” Odin says, his eye downcast. He sits down on the edge of Loki's bed, placing a hand on Loki's head. “The healers tell me you may be well enough to leave this place. They tell me you have recovered enough to sleep in your own chambers tonight. Do you... do you think you are ready, Loki?”

“If you think so,” Loki murmurs, leaning into Odin's touch. Odin hesitates, before moving his hand down to squeeze Loki's shoulder.

“You are strong, my son,” he says. “If you... if you desire, you may eat your meals in your chambers for a few days, or we can eat our meals privately, as a family.”

“If you want,” Loki replies listlessly, and Odin squeezes his shoulder again.

“Loki, I am so-” he begins, but Loki cuts him off.

“It's alright, isn't it?” he asks, his gaze vacant. “That they're gone. She was a giant, and they were half giant themselves. It is no...” Loki shudders violently, his eyes closing. “It is no great loss. A monstrous brood. _My_ monsters, but still.”

“That is... yes, Loki,” Odin says cautiously, and Loki turns his face away, his eyes still closed. “That is right, Loki. This loss will not be the end of you.”

“Because they were monsters,” Loki whispers, and Odin pats his head again.

“Servants will be by shortly to help move you back into your old room, Loki.”

“Next to Thor's?” Loki asks, his voice cracking.

“Yes,” Odin sighs, smoothing the blankets on the bed as he stands. “Thor will be by later, as well.”

“Alright,” Loki breathes out, and Odin leaves.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

There is a tentative knock at Thor's bedroom door that night, and when he opens it Loki is standing there barefoot, looking lost.

“What ails you?” Thor asks softly, ushering Loki into his room. He doesn't expect it when Loki speaks.

“I just...” Loki looks down, ashamed, and Thor pulls him into a gentle embrace. “I have not slept alone for seven years. I don't know how to sleep without...”

“It is a good thing, then, that you caught me just as I was heading to bed myself,” Thor says brightly. Loki does not call him out on the fact that he's fully dressed, or that the sun's barely down. Thor quickly shucks off most of his clothing until he is down to a simple shirt and trousers, and Loki is emotionless and unresisting as he manhandles his brother into his huge bed.

Thor tucks an arm around Loki and they are quiet in the darkness for a few minutes. Thor doesn't know all of the details, but Father told Mother most of them and she told Thor what she could before breaking down. He knows that Mother asked Heimdall every day about her son and his family, and that it was Mother who discovered that something had obscured Heimdall's vision that day. He knows that Mother had been planning on making a visit to Loki's family to meet his wife and children, and had not done so because she was afraid of being turned away.

He knows that there was a fire, and that Loki's wife and children are gone, and what little Heimdall could see afterward, he refused to tell Mother. He knows that Father told Mother some of it, and she has been weeping for her son and his family every time he's seen her.

Thor is afraid to ask, to let himself consider what Loki and Heimdall may have seen. He thinks of Hela, giggling from her perch on one of his shoulders as he proclaims her the most beautiful maiden in all of Midgard. He thinks of Jormundgandr, quiet and intelligent and a touch sarcastic, and how strongly he reminds- reminded- Thor of Mother. He thinks of Fenris, loud and mischievous and daring, climbing the tallest tree on the edge of Loki's garden and trusting Loki to catch him when he jumped.

He thinks of Loki, catching Fenris and holding him close, Loki teaching Jormundgandr about the most basic principles of the workings of the universe, Loki stealing Hela away from Thor to pepper her face with kisses. He thinks of Loki asleep, curled up against Angrboda's side, his fingers still tangled in the fishnet he was mending.

Thor exhales and presses a kiss against Loki's cheek, and is unhappy but unsurprised to feel it wet with silent tears.

“I don't understand why this happened,” Loki whispers, and Thor holds him close, because he doesn't want to believe that horrors of this magnitude happen for no reason at all, but he just doesn't have any other explanation for it.

“You will be alright,” Thor says weakly. “I will stay with you for as long as you need me, Brother.”

“What if I'm never alright?” Loki asks, his breath catching in his throat.

“Then I will stay with you _always_ ,” Thor promises. Loki shivers, and Thor tucks a warm fur around them both, even though Loki has always been colder and needed more warmth than Thor finds comfortable.

“It wouldn't have happened if I had been there,” Loki sobs, and Thor holds him closer.

“You do not know that,” he says, and Loki breaks, howling his grief into his hands.

“I should have been there, I should have saved them,” he cries out, and Thor tightens his grip around his brother and lets his own tears fall into Loki's hair. “They were my children, they were my _babies_ , and I failed to protect them and they are dead-”

It may be midnight before Loki exhausts himself, and Thor cannot sleep for the weight of his own grief, and cannot imagine living with the burden of Loki's.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

This is a thing that Loki does not know, _cannot_ know, or his mind would break entirely. Odin tells himself this, and with a heavy heart adds it to the long list of truths he must always keep from Loki.

There is a thing that was promised as _payment_ , for removing Loki's family from him, for cutting Loki's ties to Midgard.

There was a bargain, and it is one Odin refuses to honor, because he did not think it would damage his son so thoroughly when he made it.

There is an army of mercenaries from another realm, one not joined to the branches of Yggdrasil the way the Nine are, one only reachable through the application of dark energy, one that used its last dregs of dark energy to complete this horrifying task.

There is a leader, one who speaks for this army and controls it, and this leader curses Odin's name for his treachery, and promises dire retribution against Odin's family. Odin pays him no heed, because he is trapped now, and has no other allies to help him wreak his vengeance.

Odin follows the life of the boy, the last human Loki spoke to on Midgard, and at first it is simply because the boy is the only one living who truly witnessed the army that came to the village. The boy leaves the ruins of the village in what would later become Denmark for the forests that will be named Bavaria in later days, and from there he travels north again. He is looking for stories of Loki and his family, with the dim hope of learning that they survived somehow, and spreads the stories that he knows from his life with them.

He travels far and wide, and gathers much knowledge but none of it comforting, and when Odin meets him in the rebuilt village of Tonsburg where the last great battle started, he is an old man with a grown son of his own.

There is a thing that was promised as payment, a perfect cube that contains limitless supplies of dark energy, a thing that has the potential to destroy and to create. Odin hides it in the possession of an old man who had been called Gunnar in his childhood, in a place the Chitauri would not think to look for it even if they ever _did_ manage to access the Nine Realms again.

There is a long and storied history surrounding this place, this thing, and the legend of its power eventually reaches a boy named Johann who dreams of greatness, who dreams of having the power to bring a dead mother back and who dreams of exacting revenge on a world that starved her. Johann's story entwines with the story of the cube, but is nothing but a bad memory by the time the cube influences the house of Odin again.


	4. Loki the Brother

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alternately titled, _One Thousand Years Of Fucking Sadness_

The first five years are the worst. They are the worst for _everyone_ \- no one in the house of Odin knows what to say to anyone else.

The first five years are the worst, because every moment of every hour contains a raw, fresh horror for Loki. Every meal recalls a meal spent with his wife and children, every beautiful thing is uglier without his babies there to witness it, every lovely sound is harsh without his wife there to hear it.

The first five years are the worst, because Thor loses count of the meals Loki skips. He keeps a tally of the fresh scars he finds on Loki's skin until he can't anymore. Every night Loki curls up in his bed and Thor keeps a tally of the nights that are interrupted with screams or sobs, until he can't anymore.

The first five years are the worst, because Frigga can feel her son slipping from her, like an ache that throbs with every heartbeat. She can see the haggard lines drawn into her youngest's face, the dark circles and hollow cheeks, and she can see her baby age more quickly than her older son, and she despairs of ever knowing how to heal his broken heart when hers is so thoroughly shattered by this loss.

The first five years are the worst, because Volstagg's wife is alive, because his wife is warm next to him at night, and the memory of Thor's odd little brother is jagged against a backdrop of blood. Volstagg does not say- will not say, cannot say- how many hours of sleep he loses, holding his beloved to his side and terrifying himself by imagining having to experience the pain Loki feels.

The first five years are the worst, because Fandral and Hogun are the ones who find Loki in the stables with a noose around his neck, who talk him down from that nauseating moment when they both think they are about to witness his death. They speak of it to each other, later, when they have time to really think about what happened, and they report it to Odin, but they cannot meet Thor's eyes and they never actually tell him themselves.

The first five years are the worst, because Sif does not know what to do about the bratty boy who she never really liked much, she does not know what to feel, she does not know what she thinks of this. It would be so much better if he could just show some inkling of his former self, she thinks, it would be so much better if she could see even just a glimpse of the unlovable brat she used to know, if she could just find another reason to hate him more than she pities him.

The first five years are the worst, because everyone abandons him but Thor, Thor is his anchor, Thor is the only real thing in his entire world now that they're gone.

The first five years are the worst, because he's sucking the life from Thor, because Thor feels hollow and numb from the effort of trying to be Loki's sole support, because Thor doesn't know how much longer he can continue to be consumed by the flame of Loki's grief.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It happens slowly, but noticably. Loki is not a fool, and his mourning has not made him blind. Thor draws away from him more and more, until Loki retreats back to his own room more often than not, and would rather face sleepless nights haunted by death and loss rather than beg Thor to let him come by for a while.

It happens slowly- torturously, achingly slowly. Thor almost forgets what it is to breathe clearly, without the heaviness of borrowed sorrow tightening his chest, and when he is finally free of it he wonders to himself why Loki would choose to wallow in this pain rather than let some of this suffering go.

There is no one to notice, no one to _stop him_ this time, but Loki's hand falters with the knife, and he drops it and weeps into his bleeding arms until his voice breaks and runs silent, and he can shapeshift the wounds away, but the blood remains on his clothing until he remembers, days later, to change and to bathe.

He realizes that no one has noticed the bloodstains because no one has seen him, and he asks Angrboda since when she ever let him be such a filthy vagrant.

When she tells him she never would allow it, he knows her voice is a memory cobbled together in his mind, and that makes it easier for him to give in to the notion of carrying on a conversation with her.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

By the end of the first century without her, Loki finds himself speaking to her every day. She is over his shoulder, scoffing at his finery, every morning as he dresses himself- those mornings he bothers to climb out of bed, those few mornings that he feels whole enough to face living people. She chides him for eating too much, for wasting food when their children spent so much of their short lives miserably hungry, until he finds himself taking a meal only once every two or three days, and it's still not enough to make up for the gnawing starvation his boys went through.

“Goodnight, Husband,” Angrboda whispers in his ear, as she does every night.

“Goodnight, my love,” Loki replies, as he does every night.

“I love you,” she tells him, and he sighs into his pillow.

“I love you, too,” he tells her. Some nights he's lucky- some nights she goes quiet, and he can hear the soothing sound of her breathing as she sleeps, the gentle snore that she swore he imagined.

Most nights, luck is not with Loki. Most nights she keeps him awake with a litany of all the myriad ways in which he failed her and their children.

Thor does visit him, when he is not too busy adventuring with his friends. Angrboda scoffs at his attempts to include Loki in his daily proceedings.

“He speaks of love,” she sneers, and Loki isn't sure if he ever heard her speak in such a tone, but by now she's been dead longer than she was alive, and memory is a slippery thing. “Where was this love when our babies were starving?”

“He means well,” Loki mutters to himself, but it's a tired argument, and he is tired of fighting with her.

“Where was this love while we _burned_ , Loki?” she demands, and he isn't sure if she ever wanted so much from him while she was living, but he does nothing but give to her now that she's dead.

“He thinks he loves me,” Loki sighs, and his body is numb, his eyes are heavy, and it's easy to shrug away from Thor's embrace when he reminds himself that it comes rarer and rarer with each passing year, that it's the same embrace Thor offers to friends, to momentary comrades, to strangers that cross Thor's path, that whatever Thor feels for him isn't special, that he doesn't mean anything particular to his brother, that he doesn't know why he ever thought that he meant anything to Thor at all.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He changes his body until Angrboda is standing before his mirror, and he gazes at her face in horror, because he thinks he is forgetting details, and if he forgets her, does that mean she'll stop existing?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

At some point he starts going on those adventures with Thor and his friends, and he doesn't really stop to wonder why they never go to Midgard.

He hates Thor for trying to make him happy on these trips, he hates Thor for even thinking that there could ever be happiness again, but he loves Thor- it sickens him and he despises himself, but he cannot stop it either, so he teaches himself to smile and to play along, and when Thor visibly relaxes at the sight he hates Thor a little more for it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He does not speak of it with Odin. He cannot.

For many years that means they simply do not speak. That is fine.

When finally Loki finds himself able to look and speak in Odin's direction, there is a rotting wound at the core of their conversations, and both are able to ignore it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Nearly two centuries after he loses Angrboda, Loki meets a Norn enchantress, and they bond over magic. She is blonde- a darker, duller gold, not as bright and otherworldly as his Boda's hair, and her skin is a pale and fragile pink instead of the warm brown he remembers, but she is the first person after Thor to speak to Loki as if he is a person and not a caged, rabid animal, and she is warm and playful.

He goes to her bed and half-expects to be fixed by morning.

Instead he crawls out of her home and slinks back to his chambers, where Angrboda is waiting with acid in her voice.

“I see you are forgetting me,” she hisses, and Loki wishes he could make her stop, wishes he could make himself stop.

“Surely you never loved me truly if you are capable of this,” she insists, and he thinks if he could just claw his mind clean, she wouldn't be so angry with him.

“I deserve better than this, than what you are reducing me to,” she states, and he agrees wholeheartedly, she does deserve better, she always deserved better than him, than what he could do for her.

“I see I no longer matter,” she sniffs, “perhaps I never did.”

He punishes himself severely, but it does not wash the touch of Amora's hands from his skin.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The fifth and sixth centuries are bad ones. He allows himself to be used by anyone who wants to do so. He thinks it is not so great a sin against her if he does not enjoy it, if it hurts him, if it _damages_ him, but she finds new ways to be injured by his deeds, and he never manages to punish himself enough.

He is careless with his life. He leaves Asgard alone, and grows used to coming and going without being noticed.

He gains tremendous gifts for the house of Odin by losing a wager with some dwarves, and when he loses they drag him in front of the royal court and sew his lips shut. He does not see Frigga turn, white-knuckled, to implore Odin to put a stop to this madness. He does not see Thor's eyes huge and round and wet with tears of horror and fury.

He sees only the cold triumph in the eyes of the dwarven smiths, hears only the jeering laughter of a handful of courtiers.

Angrboda's voice is in his ear, and she wonders what it would feel like to tear the tongues from their laughing mouths.

“Good,” Loki admits to her, when he is alone and has torn his bleeding stitches out. “It would feel _good_.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Thor and Loki travel together, Thor because he wants a Seeress to discern his protecting spirit, Loki because he literally has nothing better to do.

Thor is mildly disappointed by the proclamation that he is linked to ravens.

Loki turns to leave, and the Seeress catches him by the wrist. “Goats,” she says, frowning. “The only safety I see for you is connected, somehow, to-”

“Goats,” Thor snickers, and Loki grins faintly at her peeved glare.

“Faint and far away,” she says, and she looks strangely at Loki. “You were happier then.”

“You're an idiot,” he replies, pushing her off. Thor later commissions a blacksmith to make them matching helmets in the fashion of their “spirit protectors.”

Loki thinks Thor's helmet resembles the wings of an eagle or a hawk.

He isn't sure what the horns on his own helmet look like, but he thinks of an ancient giantess, her head bowed under the weight of her antlers.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Do you remember the last time we had relations?” Amora asks idly, straddling his hips and raking her nails down his chest. He shivers, because it feels like ten spiders against his skin, and she has shown an eagerness to draw blood that he doesn't recall from before.

“No,” he admits. Joy is not real, nothing that has happened since losing his family is real, even the pain has not been real, because it has not been enough to clean him. He knows he's fucked Amora in the past, but he can't remember details, just a deep well of shame that has not left his mind since.

“You wept during,” she remarks, and he wonders why he would do that, but it was centuries ago, and time has never seemed to pass normally for him after leaving Midgard. Half his mind races at the pace of the mortal realm, and the other half is as stagnant and unmoving as Asgard itself, and he feels torn in two at the best of times.

“Oh,” he says finally, staring up at the ceiling, past her face. “I don't remember.”

“I assumed it was because you did not enjoy the touch of women,” she adds, rolling her hips with a frown, watching for a reaction, for anything. “I suppose that turned out to be true enough, did it not?”

“What do you mean?” he asks, blinking at her.

“You have not been careful, my Prince,” she says sweetly. “You have been seen in the company of many a warrior.”

“I have tasted both,” Loki says blankly, “I do not see how you would get the impression I don't _enjoy_ women.”

“Perhaps if you acted the way a man ought in bed,” Amora snaps.

“Perhaps you're not very good,” he counters, and she slaps him hard across the face, and he thinks she'll get up and leave, but she bends closer to him and bares her teeth instead.

He doesn't know if he likes the look on her face, and she turns the rest of the evening into a drawn-out, torturous affair. It ends only after he begs, and she leaves him broken, and he hopes blindly that it is enough to appease Angrboda's ghost, and it is not.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It is nearly eight centuries since he lost them. He is terrified of the passage of time. He knows their faces are seared into his heart forever, but he is losing the details of their lives, he can't quite recall the voices of his children, and he's long since accepted that Angrboda's voice is merely the softer tone he takes in his female form.

He catches himself wondering what color Hela's eyes were, and he nearly claws out his own in frustration as he tries to recall their exact shade.

He finds himself forgetting what Jori's favorite food was, and all he can recall is that Jori was quiet about his hunger, the bruised smudges under the eyes of a toddler and pudgy fingers that became thin.

He finds himself helpless to remember the scent of Fenris's hair, the way it felt to bury his nose in his boy's mop of curls, and all he can smell is smoke.

He accompanies Thor because to be alone with the voice in his head would leave him helpless, and he smiles outwardly at Thor's carousing and inwardly seethes. He thinks Thor a liar, a breaker of promises, although he no longer remembers which promise it was Thor broke, only that it was a promise that Loki needed to survive.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

They are looking up at the stars over Alfheim, the firelight burned down to nothing, their companions all asleep. Thor takes Loki's hand and they sit in companionable silence. There are a hundred questions Thor wishes he were strong enough to ask and a thousand things he wishes he could say without sounding false, just as Thor knows Frigga has hovered for centuries trying to find the right way to comfort her child, to connect with him.

“I don't remember the stars anymore,” Loki says finally, his grip tightening. “I remember that I taught their names and ways, but I don't remember... I don't remember the stars.”

“We can... if you wish, I can take you to Midgard,” Thor offers quietly, and Loki shudders violently.

“No. I...” He turns and buries his face against Thor's shoulder, and Thor is relieved that, at the very least, Loki didn't turn _away_ this time. He draws his fingertips over Loki's shoulders, tracing soothing circles through the linen tunic.

“I love you, Loki,” Thor murmurs, and Loki makes an odd noise into his shirt.

“I love you too, Brother,” he says, his voice muffled. Thor smiles weakly and continues to watch the stars.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Odin relaxes. A Loki who turns his hatred inward is a _manageable_ Loki. If Loki were ever to direct the full force of his loathing and anger towards another- towards Odin, towards Asgard- he could wreak destruction on a scale even Odin would have trouble fixing or hiding. Instead he turns his knives against his own flesh and he saves the worst, most venomous barbs for the privacy of his own chambers, and Odin watches and sees all of this, and is relieved that Loki has not aimed his ire towards anyone else.

Odin watches Loki's actions but does not know his mind, and does not see the resentment that festers there- towards Odin and Frigga for driving him away in his childhood, towards Asgard for _not being Midgard,_ towards Thor for daring to be happy when there is nothing good left in the world.

Odin relaxes his vigil over Loki, and does not see the subtle way Loki's eyes change when he tells his sons that there will be a coronation announcement for Thor.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_Just giants_ , Loki thinks, after he's opened the door for three angry young intruders. Monsters whose passing will leave no great mark on the nine realms.

His babies were only half giant, and their passing meant nothing to anyone. These jotun animals will not be missed.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Odin is in his Sleep and Thor is banished to Midgard, and Frigga is just relieved that Loki is finally talking to her.

“We never wanted you to feel different,” she explains, and it seems obvious to her that after Angrboda and the loss of his world, she could not bear to tear away one more thing from him.

It is not obvious to Loki, and he sees the words as what they are- mere words, empty and meaningless without greater context, and he still clings to the very last thread of hope that Frigga may one day love him, and cannot even fathom that he's had her love all his life.

He thinks of a scheme to win her love and prove his loyalty to Odin, and it feels perfect.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Loki cannot set foot on Midgard- on Earth- he cannot even bear the thought, so he sends a double in his stead. Thor is on Earth and there is a man who watches constantly. He is an ordinary man with extraordinary skills and talents, but a mortal man nonetheless. He is a mortal man who would dare to kill a god, and even if he doesn't know Thor's true self, that is an outrage that should not be overlooked. He has been marked.

His story is different depending on the teller, but those who know him best can attest to the truth of the circus.

The very few who know him truly know of the kindly old fraud who told fortunes and gave him enough love to counteract the poisons that tried to taint his heart.

After the large man cannot lift the hammer, the watcher climbs down from his perch and feels an inexplicable urge to contact the kind old woman who loved him when he was young. He picks up a phone when he has a moment free, and she sounds exactly how he remembers her, strong and crackly and with the faintest hint of Scandinavia in her accent.

“Watch over yourself, Birdy,” she tells him.

“Take care, you nutty old hag,” he laughs, and even with his spirits lifted he feels a sense of foreboding when he hangs up.


	5. Loki the Prisoner, Pt 1

He falls and falls and falls and with a sudden, bone-snapping jerk, he is caught.

They swarm like insects, a few taking curious bites of his flesh with them, and he lets it happen, gazing blankly at the unending void dotted with stars above.

“We meet again, Odinson,” a voice says from the shadows, deep and dark and full of the promise of pain, and the hordes scurry away and Loki is alone and bleeding on a rough stone floor, and there is one of the... creatures, before him.

“I've never met you,” Loki mutters, and the creature- the figure- the _other_ one laughs at him.

“It must be so quaint, passively experiencing time as a linear thing,” it sneers, and Loki is having a hard time focusing on its face, because he isn't sure if the Other is organic or mechanic in its basic nature, appearing as some unholy union of the two.

He is bitterly disappointed, and just so very tired. He doesn't understand why he's alive awake right now, and he closes his eyes on the off chance that it's the final step he needs to take to slough off this cumbersome existence.

There is a hand at his throat, meaty and many-fingered, and with it comes pain that dances through every nerve and rends its way through Loki's body like Mjolnir through wet paper.

“It's not the time to rest just yet,” the Other purrs, and even with his eyes open Loki's vision is nothing but white stars at the end of a gray tunnel.

Five days it lasts, unending and yet outside of time. When it is over Loki is shaking like a leaf, but his body is exactly as it was the moment he fell from the Bifrost, his armor a little scuffed and dented from his fight with Thor, more solid than the person wearing it.

“What do you want,” Loki gasps from the floor, and the Other crouches over him.

“What I want matters not,” it hisses, and fear finds an old nest in Loki's heart, and he feels naked despite the weight of metal and leather and linen on his body. “What you will do is His will, exile.”

“What?” Loki asks, sounding dazed and feigning only part of it.

“My Master is now yours,” the Other promises him, and Loki thinks that slash of bloodred teeth is a smile. “And our Master desires entry into the Nine Realms.”

“And you think I'll help you... why?” Loki asks, and the Other's mouth is close, its teeth are close, and Loki remembers the swarm, tearing off chunks of him like he was nothing but a morsel of food dropped in their midst.

“Is not the promise of pain followed by a slow, dishonorable death motivation enough?” it asks mockingly, and Loki curls his lip in a sneer.

“I know not how you conjured me to this place outside of the Nine, but surely you realize I was in the midst of a suicide attempt,” he says, and the Other seems to consider him, its eyeless features angled above Loki's face. “I flung myself from the wreck of the Bifrost. Life holds no interest in me, and even an eventual and painful death would be preferable to listening to your inane blathering.”

“You think yourself above threats, above coercion,” the Other muses, and even its alien features reveal a wicked grin to Loki. “You think you have nothing left to lose, exile.”

“Of course,” Loki says, mustering up a sense of vanity and lifting his chin a little. “I have nothing to fear from one such as yourself.”

“Oh how I will _enjoy_ your education, child,” the Other laughs, and the pain begins anew.

Another week of it passes, and after it ends Loki is dragged, weak and unresisting, to a dark cavern, through an iron door and into a hallway full of rooms.

Loki lifts his head and breathes out with a shudder. The rooms are carved from the dead rock of this wretched place, and the ways in are barred with bonelike metal grates.

“I am to be caged?” he asks, sneering weakly. He cares nothing for being jailed, and if he is to be imprisoned he will find a way to end himself. This would be a terrible fate, he thinks, if he were attached to his life. As it is, he knows this ordeal will be over soon, and there is a sweetness in that.

His captors drag him to a cell and shove him inside. It takes him a few moments to realize that the cell is already occupied, three small figures and one taller than he is, cowering against the shadowed wall.

Loki staggers back, clutching at the bars to keep himself upright.

“...Loki?” the taller one asks. Female. Familiar. Loki blinks, breathing hard.

The smallest prisoner hurtles at him, pinning him against the bars. It's a very small girl, her long black hair tied back, and she clutches at his legs and wails at him, and Loki cannot move, he cannot breathe.

“Loki, what happened?” the woman asks, and Loki shakes his head, shutting his eyes.

“You cannot trick me,” he chokes out, gasping for air. “You cannot trick me with, with, with visions of my family, you cannot, this is futile, I will not be so easily fooled by this-”

“Daddy,” Fenris pleads, stepping forward and reaching tentatively for Loki's sleeve. “Where were you? We were scared.”

“Stop,” Loki pleads, curling up into a ball, his head in his hands. “Stop. You can't- no, no. Stop, right now, _stop_.”

“Children,” Angrboda commands, and how could Loki have forgotten her voice? How could he have replaced her beautiful voice with his own whisperings? The tiny hands are pulled away from him, and Hela is still crying but it's not real, it cannot be real, and this will all go away soon enough, they always go away, and this time will be no different.

“Husband,” Angrboda whispers, close by, her hand on his arm. “Loki, what has happened to you?”

He whimpers, he lets out a strangled sob, he breaks. She wraps her arms around him and gently rocks him, shushing him and pressing kisses against the top of his head, and she does not disappear and she does not turn on him. There is no venom in this Angrboda, she just holds him and hoarsely sings to him an ancient lullaby he'd invented when Jori was still so tiny and wanted to look at everything. He's long since forgotten the words, but she remembers them all, and he does not know how this can be. This is every terrible dream he's ever had, every dream that ended with the morning light and the horror of the waking world.

And they are here, in this den where monsters have tortured him and laughed at the deed. It is every nightmare he's had in the thousand years since he lost them, and yet it is worse than any nightmare he's ever had before.

“Don't let them touch you,” Loki hears himself whisper, and Angrboda strokes his back and agrees that she won't. He looks up and the boys are both holding Hela, and they look so _hungry_. He reaches out for them, he'd let them take anything they wanted, the meat off his bones, anything at all. They are staring at him like he's a stranger, but the boys relax just slightly- he feels Angrboda move, he thinks she nodded- and Hela runs at him and buries herself in his arms.

Loki cannot speak at all after that, he just holds them and breathes, and if they speak his mind screams _alive alive alive_ and _it's a trick_ , it's not real.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“What does your master want?” Loki asks, his gaze fixed firmly ahead.

“The Jewel of the House of Odin,” the Other answers, and Loki looks at it, frowning.

“The Tesseract? It has been missing since...” He's not all that sure, to be honest. “For hundreds of years. Since my youth. Even Odin's all-seeing gaze, even Heimdall's, has been obscured. It is lost.”

“It has been found,” the Other replies, and Loki blinks, tilting his head just slightly. “And those who found it seek to channel its power, to wield its strength.”

“You know where it is,” Loki says softly, “surely you may snatch it from their grasp as easily as you snatched me.”

“Not so easily, exile,” the Other explains, pacing a bit. “Locked in this realm outside of the Nine, we are helpless to cross over. Just as you are helpless to escape, as are your children.”

“Yes,” Loki drawls, eyes narrowing. “It's a clever illusion you've managed to produce, a family that's been a millennium dead. Did you think me so easily fooled? Did you think I'd _forget_ ,” and the word spits itself out of him, leaving clawmarks in his throat, “did you think ten centuries of mourning would disappear and I'd believe your little charade?”

The Other stops and turns to look at him, and Loki takes a step forward, his fury expanding in his chest.

“Or perhaps,” Loki growls, his hands clenching into fists at his sides, his whole body shaking. “You imagined I'd be grateful. So grateful,” he snarls, coming closer, “just to see them again, even for a moment, even if it were a lie, that in my gratitude I would be your willing puppet? That I would defy every cause that I ever believed in for the good of my kingdom, and give you a limitless tool to conquer my home, just for the sake of a few ghosts?”

“Such anger, exile,” the Other sneers. “Have your wife and children displeased you?”

“Enough!” Loki hisses, eyes wild. “Enough of this! It is not yours, you will not have it! I will not be swayed by paltry tricks, I cannot be swayed by anything you do to me, do you understand?”

“You do not understand,” the Other tells him, coming close now, leaning in as if unafraid of Loki's rage. “You will understand your situation soon enough, exile.”

It puts its hand on Loki's face and before Loki can recoil there is a flash and there is pain-

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It is disorienting, at first. He is tethered to a mind and he sees everything through its eyes, but the mind is a hive and there are dozens of eyes, hundreds.

He is in a forest- old and clean and strong, and he is spread out through the trees, moving under the cover of night. Dawn finally breaks, and enough of him is aware to realize that he would have left his home near dawn, that he would be long gone by the time this mind and these eyes came to be in his village.

There is screaming when the village finally comes into view, and Loki tries and is unable to turn away from the sight of friends and neighbors torn to pieces, torn apart, children gunned down as they run. He wants to scream and he cannot.

He is carried on legs that are not his own and comes to the path he knows well. He sees from afar when they capture his wife, he sees with his own eyes as he puts a strangely formed hand around her throat and drags her away. He watches as they snatch up his babies, he carries them roughly and without love into the darkness. When his family is gone he sees ~~_them_~~ himself drag a neighbor's dead daughter by the ankle to the house as he starts setting it ablaze, he tears the bones from the flesh and throws them into the growing fire.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He is moaning when he comes to himself again, his eyes shut.

“Perhaps now you see the depth of your failure,” the Other suggests, and Loki's stomach heaves at the sound of its voice. “Perhaps now you see that this is no illusion.”

“They died,” Loki whispers, eyes shut. “They died. They are gone. They are... they aren't here.”

“Very well,” the Other says, agreeably enough, and there is a soft sound and it seems to come from so far away, but he knows that sound, it's Fenris, the way he always caught himself before saying something he knows to be rude. Not that Fenris _never_ said anything rude- far from it, Loki's mind supplies, the boy usually managed to find some embarrassing way to put things without meaning to- but when he knew he was about to be rude he'd cut himself suddenly off.

That sound. Loki hears it, and lifts his head, and he can see his curly-headed son, dragged by the collar of his shirt.

Fenris looks up and meets Loki's gaze, and his eyes widen.

“Dad-” he cries, and flinches back when the Other turns towards him.

“Be still,” the Other orders. “That creature has decided that he is not your father. That you are not his son. That you are not real.”

Loki blinks, and Fenris looks over at Loki, hurt and shocked. Loki's never seen his son look that way, he never made such a face in life.

“Wait,” Loki says, his tongue thick in his mouth, “wait.”

“No,” the Other says, and it places its hand on Fenris's face and the boy goes white and starts screaming in utter agony. Loki is on his feet in a second, his voice high and shrill.

“No, don't, stop it, please,” Loki cries out, and the screaming doesn't stop, it's as if the Other does not hear him. “Stop- stop it, stop it, I'll do it, I'll do _anything_ , just please-”

Just like that, the screaming subsides into whimpers. The Other lets Fenris go, and Loki is somehow there, scooping his boy into his arms, babbling worthless words of comfort.

“You will take the child back to the others,” the Other tells him, “and then we will put you to work, exile.”

The trip back to the cell is a blur- the next thing Loki really understands is being in the cell with his family, Angrboda tearing Fenris from his arms, and that's... that's right. Loki sits with his back to the bars, watching her fuss over their son, and after a moment he speaks, his voice harsh and ragged.

“How long have you been prisoner here?” he asks, and she gives him a strange look.

“Days are hard to measure without sun or stars,” she says slowly, her fingers stroking through her boy's hair. “But I would put it at... nearly three weeks of this captivity, Loki. Why has it taken so long for you to find us?”

Her voice is soft and forgiving, and Loki inhales sharply and covers his face with his hands. Fenris cries softly into his mother's neck, and it's Loki's fault, it's completely and utterly his fault.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

They take him and put him to work. It is simple enough at the beginning, because for the most part his responsibility is to merely answer questions. The questions sometimes make little sense to him, sometimes come too quickly on the heels of the last, and he learns the penalty for snapping, for answering with sarcasm.

The Other has a way of humbling Loki further, and other ways after _that_ , and it's far too close to what Loki has lived with since the fire that took his family. He starts to wonder if the fire wasn't real, after all. He starts to wonder if they aren't truly dead, if this is just another thing like the ghost of Angrboda he created in himself.

His silver tongue fails him and he stumbles over words and finally he fails to answer, and finds himself crying into his cold, dry hands.

“Please, can I just see them?” he asks hoarsely, his lips cracking, and the Other growls low and says, _perhaps. Soon._ If He gets what He wants.

Loki doesn't know how long the questions last after that. He remembers waking up alone in a cold cell, and for half a blinding second he thinks he's in the cell with his wife and children.

Time passes strangely. He knows they stop to give him some water every couple of days, but if they think he'll fall victim to hunger they have another thing coming. He knows what hunger is, and he has survived through longer.

At some point he must do something right, because guards drag him to the cell and this time his family really is there, Fenris still wide-eyed and unusually quiet, and everyone just stares at him in a kind of mute shock for a moment, and Loki's just so tired that when Hela runs for him he scoops her up and cries silently into her hair, his body wracking with stifled sobs.

“Loki,” Angrboda says gently, putting a hand against his forehead. “Loki, you're so thin, and you're freezing. How have you lost so much weight since this morning?”

Loki chokes out a laugh, and Hela whimpers and clutches at his chest.

He has, he reckons, about six hours with them before the guards take him away again.

They start feeding him when they give him water now, a thin gruel that looks to be laced with dark blood. Loki isn't ready to try anything just yet, but after a few days of work, now using his magic to construct a device that can activate the Tesseract from afar, he actually slumps to the ground and stares, dazed, at the floor for several moments.

He starts eating whatever they put in front of him. It makes him a little stronger, but mostly it makes him feel numb and distant, and he thinks that's not exactly right, but all that matters right now is finishing this so that his family can be safe.

It's another few weeks before he remembers to ask to see them again. His request is granted, though, and that very night, he thinks, he is escorted down to the cell.

The boys take one look at him and Fenris starts crying, Jormundgandr trying desperately to care for his twin. Angrboda just stares at him and Hela buries her face in her mother's skirt, stealing little glances at Loki as he sits on the floor and watches them.

“Loki,” she says softly. “Sweetheart, are you alright?”

“Oh, yes,” Loki tells her, and is mildly interested in the strangeness of his own voice. “I've been very good, I promise.” A sudden thought strikes him, and he looks anxiously at her. “You're not still angry, are you?”

“Angry?” she asks, still staring at him with an expression he's seen before, the way she would gently talk to the village women who were in the worst of their labor pains. “I'm not angry, Loki. Can you get up? Are you able to walk?”

“You were so angry,” Loki sighs, and he leans his head back against the bars of the cell, content to watch his family exist. “Every day in Asgard, because of what I did.”

“You didn't do anything, Loki,” she whispers, and he seems to have lost track of her, because she's close now, holding his face and looking at each of his eyes separately. He's seen her do that before, too. “You should try to get some sleep, if you can.”

“I know this isn't real,” Loki mumbles, gazing up at her, and her mouth tightens. “I burned down your house. Our house. Father caught me in a stream. Baba wanted... Baba wanted to mourn you together.” He inhales shakily, and thinks of woodsmoke.

“We're not dead,” Angrboda says carefully, and Loki grins painfully.

“You all died. Years ago. Only I couldn't pretend the kids were still around. It was just you and me for a while there.” Loki's smile fades, and he blinks. “You're not... you're not still angry, are you?”

“I'm not angry,” Angrboda says, her eyes narrowed. “I'm not angry at _you_. I actually am angry. Loki, do you mean to say that... that you've believed us dead the weeks while we were here without you?”

“It wasn't weeks,” Loki admits, and he closes his eyes after all. “You've all been dead for years.”

“No,” Angrboda says, and he can feel her back away from him. It's better that way, he reminds himself. It's what he's used to. “That can't be true.”

“It's alright,” he says coaxingly, waking himself up a little so he can make it true. “I've been so good. You'll see. The bulk of the work is done. They just need to prepare their troops and give me what I need to open the door. Then they'll let us be together again. I've been so good for you, Boda.”

“Don't go back to them,” she pleads, and he stands, his whole body shaking a little. “Something's wrong, Loki. Please, just-”

“I can do it,” Loki tells her, and he doesn't think he's slept much lately, but it won't matter once the Tesseract's door is open. He isn't sure what they want him to do with it once he's got it. He supposes they'll tell him when he does.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Loki experiences a moment of clarity, and recoils in horror.

“No,” he says, and the Other turns to look at him.

“No?” it repeats, and Loki takes a step back.

“Not Earth. I cannot... I cannot lead an attack against my, my-” He cannot say _home_ , but the Other sneers at him anyway.

“It is a little world, and no matter what it is, it is not _your_ anything,” it growls, pushing Loki back until he stumbles against a rocky wall. “It is, after all, your brother's.”

“Thor?” Loki asks, and even now, with most of his mind running on fumes, a scowl forms. “He cannot own a world, not that world. He has never had a home there. He's never lived there. And he's certainly not its king.”

“No,” the Other suggests, “but you could be.”

“No,” Loki snarls, and the Other is very, very close.

“Allow me to change your mind,” it says softly.

Some time passes. Impossible to say how much.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_this is unacceptable, he's a quivering wreck, he cannot lead_

_loki thinks that's unfair, he could do it, he will do it, anything at all, he has one price and it's so little a price, please, just let him take them home safe_

_see, he's far too dependent, you were warned about using them, best just to kill them and start him from the ground up_

_loki wails, and there is something cutting him up from the inside out_

_we can provide a workaround, it is just such a shame to waste resources_

_and loki is screaming and screaming and screaming_

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“The Tesseract is on Earth. You will lead the first assault into a densely populated human settlement,” the Other says, and something feels vaguely familiar about this conversation. Loki blinks away shadows, because after his last visit he feels strangely invigorated to take Boda and the children somewhere safe, where nothing will ever touch them again, and it's occurred to him that this will never happen unless he has the power of a throne. Literally as well as symbolically- any sort of an army is one to have at your disposal, of course, but he thinks it clear that he'll never garner the kind of respect he needs to keep them well-protected living out his days on a small farm, building toys and mending nets.

“Earth will be mine,” Loki says slowly, and the Other stares mildly at him, at his audacity. “You will have the others of the Nine, and all the worlds that lie beyond. I ask only for Earth and for my family, as payment for my service.”

“You are in no position to bargain,” the Other snarls, and Loki's lip curls slightly.

“Neither are you. You still need someone to force a portal of the proper size open, and to keep it open indefinitely, and you need someone who isn't part of the hive to organize the first assault.” He feels a little nervous, and the Other's voice drops to a soft growl.

“Naming them as your prize, Asgardian? Very well. Your success will grant these gifts to you. And your failure...” The Other lets it trail off, and Loki's imagination fills in the rest.

“I won't fail,” Loki says simply.

 


	6. Loki the Conqueror

“You have heart,” Loki says, because it would be strange to say _i've been watching you and know your secrets and you are perfect_.

Later- maybe two hours, possibly three- the vehicle stops and Loki lurches against the back of the window, and he is not sure he has much in the way of standing upright anymore. The place they are in is dry and rocky and he doesn't like it- it feels cold right now in the darkness of night, but he knows it will heat up in daylight. It's not a good place to bring Boda and the kids; there wouldn't be anywhere for them to fish or swim or plant seeds, and there are no trees for Fenris to climb.

“What is this place?” he asks, and it's the archer who answers.

“Arizona,” he says, and that makes no impact on Loki whatsoever. He closes his eyes for a moment, and it seems that very suddenly after that, he's being moved up from a prone position, strong hands leaning his back against the side of the vehicle.

“I need Selvig,” Loki mumbles, and the archer starts to say something about waiting while he goes and fetches him, and Loki's hand snags on the front of his uniform.

“No. No, I... just mean that you are released,” Loki explains, forcing his eyes open. “I have no more need of your talents. You can return to your people, if they will have you. You've done your part in this.”

“No, I haven't,” the archer calmly replies, his eyes burning bright. “It's telling me I can't leave yet.”

“It-?” Loki asks, then it dawns on him. “It's meant to be under my command. I use it, as its master- it should not be able to control you beyond my own wishes.”

“Yeah? I got a bridge I can sell you, wanna see it?” the archer asks dryly, and Loki is deeply annoyed. He likes what he knows about this archer, and other than his goats back home, he's never been very good at keeping a pet. He's pretty sure the human is going to die in the completion of this task. He tells himself not to get too attached.

“Well, I don't need to know your name, I suppose,” Loki says grudgingly. Hopefully this human will become an anonymous face in the mob.

“M'name's Clint Barton,” the archer offers.

“Damn it,” Loki mutters.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“I do not understand its purpose,” Loki says, after a few minutes of watching the disorienting display on the screen. “Is this some sort of training tool, Agent Barton?” It seems possible, from what Barton's shared of his skills, that it is some kind of teaching implement, although why it would then be set in a strange city and time, using anachronistic weaponry against imagined foes, Loki has no idea.

“Nah,” Barton says, his thumbs moving relentlessly over the small device in his hands, and the figure on the screen seems to follow some sort of orders from those movements. “We have an eighteen hour trip ahead of us and there's nothing for me to do right now, so I'm playing a game.”

“A game,” Loki repeats, and the headache grating against the back of his forehead seems to intensify. “You're doing this for... fun.”

“Well, unless you got a job for me,” Barton says, looking up. Loki shakes his head mutely, and Barton goes back to moving his thumbs and staring at the screen. “I've played this game before.”

“So you take pleasure in killing those people?” Loki asks finally, and Barton pauses the game and gives him a look.

“It's a game,” he repeats, eyebrow raised. “The events in the game didn't really happen, and even if they did, this game isn't making them happen. Watch.” Barton does something and suddenly the screen goes white, and then the chain of events they've been watching replays itself all over again, with absolutely no variation of detail.

“See?” Barton asks, and Loki resigns himself to not understanding the appeal. He is about to just head over to see what Selvig's doing when Barton adds, “I mean, even kids play Assassin's Creed.”

“What?” Loki demands, envisioning Jormundgandr and Fenris lodged in front of one of these screens and perpetrating acts of serial murder for fun and enjoyment. It makes his skin crawl. “This is not for children.”

“Well, not technically, but that doesn't stop 'em,” Barton says with a shrug, and Loki is horrified.

“When I am ruler of this realm, such things will be forbidden,” he says sternly, and Barton turns all the way around to look at him. “What is it now, Agent Barton?”

“Are you even being serious right now?” he asks flatly. “First thing you did when you came here was murder a dozen real people, and who knows how many got hurt or injured when the base collapsed? And you're sitting here with two mind-slaves who are helping you put together a plan to kill more people and let a fucking space armada in to subjugate humanity. And you're going to take a conservative stance on violence in video games?”

“That is different,” Loki snaps. “I am going to do whatever it takes to get my wife and children to a safe haven, these so-called games are violent for no reason but to enjoy violence.”

“Yeah, because an ant has no quarrel with a boot,” Barton replies, and Loki is pretty sure he doesn't like Barton anymore, but the man's been the most useful of the two captives so far.

“You seem to have an awful lot of moral authority, for a man who murders strangers in cold blood for money,” Loki reminds him, and Barton rolls his eyes.

“I'm not the one who's trying to act all high and mighty about the violent content in video games, Boss,” Barton retorts. Loki frowns.

“You would understand,” he says instead of the really nasty thing he wants to say, “if you had children of your own.”

“That would never fucking happen,” Barton says, a little too cheerfully. “I don't exactly do family.”

Loki purses his lips but can't find it in himself to antagonize Barton further, so he goes and sees what Selvig's up to with the tesseract.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It's nearly twelve hours later and the damn plane is still flying, and nobody seems capable of sleep, even though Loki's bones are screaming to escape his flesh.

Every time he closes his eyes there is a flash of memory, some awful moment in the care of the Other, and a searing pain that lasts half a second but takes several minutes to fade away.

He catches Barton jerking himself awake with a haunted expression, and after the third or fourth time he clears his throat to get Barton's attention.

“What do you see when it happens?” he asks, and Barton frowns.

“This is not something I'm comfortable talking about,” he replies, and Loki feels himself scowl.

“I order you to tell me,” he says, and the look of nearly physical pain on Barton's face annoys Loki. He half wishes he could take it back, but maybe it doesn't matter. He shouldn't be protecting Barton's feelings, if the archer will be dying soon enough anyway.

“I see my brother,” Barton says finally.

It's not what Loki expects and it's not what he wants to hear, and he leaves it alone.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“You're not lookin' so good,” Barton says, as they prepare to travel to Germany to retrieve the ore and the retina scan.

“It had been... a while,” Loki admits, because they are alone and it is dark and even with his ability to rebel stripped from him, Barton is more of a real person to Loki than the mercenaries and terrorists who have populated the base Barton has supplied them with. “Before I came here, I mean... it had been a while since the last time I slept.”

“Shit,” Barton says, and for a moment Loki is touched. “Do you think it's going to impair your ability to get the portal open?”

Loki is no longer touched.

“You just worry about keeping up your end of the plan, Barton,” Loki admonishes. He tries to remind himself that even if Barton weren't under the yoke of the scepter, he still wouldn't care about Loki. In another life, Barton would be an enemy.

He is only human, and humans are weak. Humans are fragile. Humans die, and even the ones Loki loved in the time and the place where he was whole are now nothing, not even dust, not even memories.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He does not dare let himself sleep while in captivity- he casts what magics he can to keep his exhaustion covered, and Thor looks at him with a dull horror in his eyes, but no shock or disgust, so Loki is pretty sure his magics are working.

“Please help me understand,” Thor begs of him through the thick glass of the containment cell. “Midgard was your home once. You have never even wanted to rule. Why are you doing this?”

“You are a fool,” Loki growls. “There is only one reason why I would want to rule. There has only ever been one reason.” He cannot tell Thor about Angrboda and the children. Thor would try to stop him, would try to find a way to talk Loki out of this invasion, this war, and then Loki would lose them forever this time.

“Father-” Thor begins, and stops, clearly troubled. “Father spoke of jealousy. He spoke of your horror at finding the truth of your bloodline, and that you felt... passed over, in affection and power.”

“You were right, all those years ago,” Loki sneers. “You were right when Odin banished you, powerless, to a realm where you knew nothing of the people or culture. Odin _is_ an old man and a fool.”

Thor is quiet, his face a conflicting mess of different emotions. Finally, he speaks again.

“It's been only a year's time since that day, Loki,” he says softly. “Less. Loki, please-”

“Time is meaningless,” Loki snarls, his heart lurching. How long has his time here on this mission felt to his wife and children? Has it been seconds, minutes, hours? Or have centuries flown past and will Loki be rewarded with their bones?

“Brother, this must end,” Thor pleads. “Think, please. This is not you. If Angrboda was here she'd-”

“How dare you,” Loki breathes out, and Thor takes a step back, knowing he's stepped too far. “How dare you speak her name? How dare you try to use her to manipulate me?”

“Loki, I am sorry, but this madness must stop,” Thor tries, and Loki slaps his hand against the glass, teeth bared like a dog's.

“Leave me. Leave me, and do not ever return, for I never want to see your face again,” Loki spits out, and Thor stands for a moment before retreating, casting guilty looks over one shoulder at Loki as he leaves.

He is still seething when Agent Romanov comes in, but he puts on a smile for her benefit.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Loki recognizes this man from the picture painted by Barton's words. He thinks of Barton, mindlessly killing the people in his little game, because it's fun to do so.

He thrusts the blade through the man's back, splintering ribs and rending muscle, and lifts the blade slightly before sliding it back out. He doesn't feel the same pleasure he suspects Barton feels when the little assassin on the screen does it to the little men in that city. Then again, it may be because he knows the man in front of him is only a handful of minutes' walk from a surgery- crude by the standards of Asgard's healers, but efficient enough to ensure that this is no death sentence. He suspects it would be one on the battlefield.

Thor reacts badly, and Loki assumes it's because Thor didn't take the path down here that went past the medical bay. Then again, it may just be Thor's nature to react badly to things.

It may just be something in their blood, he thinks, before he remembers that it's most assuredly not.

He sends Thor on a little trip- hopefully Thor will be so disoriented and lost that he misses the next bits completely.

The man- on the floor, bleeding, with a cannon between his legs- tells him that he's going to lose.

“Where exactly is my disadvantage?” Loki asks, and maybe he means it. Losing this means losing everything.

The man tells him that he lacks conviction. That startles him- because no, he doesn't want to win this for the sake of the Other and the Chitauri, but if he doesn't win- if he should fail and it's not convincing enough that he really and truly _tried_ -

Then he is blasted through a wall. He shakes himself off and staggers to safety. He could go back and finish the man off for good, he supposes, but there is no need. The man will be confined to a healer's bed for days, maybe even weeks or months, and by the time he is any sort of threat Loki will have already won the Earth.

He leaves Barton behind. He's a little sorry to do so, but he never expected Barton to survive this.

He imagines his boys would have liked Barton. He imagines Hela would have been keenly interested in Agent Romanov. Something about Barton reminds Loki of Angrboda's family, and he thinks they would have gotten along like a house on fire.

He decides to tell the children about the Archer who helped him save them, when they are all together again.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“Do you think this madness will end with your rule?” Thor asks, and Loki looks around and he realizes that no, it will not.

“It's too late,” Loki whispers, because Thor is right. His beautiful children and his fiercely independent wife have no place in an Earth that burns.

He will make them a place. Or he will not. A living family with no place in the world is infinitely better than a dead one. He stabs the knife into Thor's side, but it's not long enough to kill and it's not poisoned besides. He remembers that Thor loved his children.

He thinks Thor will understand, later.

“Sentiment,” he says, and a tear rolls down his face, because deep down, he knows the truth of how this is going to end, but if he accepts it he will crumble into nothingness.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He does not notice, at first. He is too busy trying to pull himself up from his broken position on the floor of Stark's tower to notice that he is not alone. He's a little relieved to see that Barton has survived mostly unscathed, although Barton has an arrow pointed at his eye, so perhaps he's not so relieved after all. He hopes Barton has at least told them what he knows about Loki's children. He hopes they found a way to the Chitauri home base and freed the prisoners there.

“If it's all the same to you,” he says, looking around. “I think I'll have that drink now.”

Stark does bring him one, eventually. He is bound hand and foot, and the drink in Stark's hand has a bendy pink straw sticking out of it.

Loki is not so numb from the aftereffects of battle that he has not started to suspect what his heart already knows. Thor would be down here the very moment he learned that Boda and the children were alive. He does not sip from the drink, and merely asks, “The portal was closed? How many of their number still lives?”

“None,” Stark says smugly. “Didn't you get the memo? The feds tried to destroy Manhattan with a nuke, but I carried it through the portal and it destroyed the mothership.”

“What,” Loki asks flatly. He does not know what he feels. Everything inside him is ripping apart.

“Yep. With the main controls gone, your little army keeled over and died in the streets,” Stark says, but the smugness is fading the more he watches Loki.

Loki takes a deep breath, then another.

He lunges, but Stark is already gone, and Loki screams violence and curses until blood splatters his teeth and Thor is restraining him, roaring to be heard over the sound of Loki's fury.

After that there is a muzzle. After that there is nothing. After that there is no point to anything, and Loki lets himself be led from place to place until he is being offered one handle of a quaint little device that holds the Tesseract inside, and Thor is giving him a grim, even stare.

The trial is short. The punishment is just- more than fair, for a man who has twice let his children die in fire.

He does not look at Odin as his sentence is read.

He does not look at Thor or at Frigga.

It is only later, as Loki is being led away, that he realizes that the one who knew of Loki's time with the Chitauri knew- must know, had always known- that part of that time Loki spent with his family, as well.

He knows Thor did not know- has never even suspected.

He knows Thor was not told.

He is led into his impossibly dark prison and chained to the wall, too low to stand comfortably but just high enough that he cannot sit or kneel. It is utterly silent and utterly sightless, and there is only the faintest glimmer of light when his first- and, he suspects, last- visitor comes to see him.

“You were the one who told Thor of the Chitauri,” Loki says quietly, and Odin sighs.

“It saddens me to have had things come to this,” Odin murmurs.

“And yet you didn't tell him what they did to me there,” Loki adds, and Odin paces a little.

“You were not in your right mind, Loki. Pity would have stayed Thor's hand, and he would have held back where you would not. I was not willing to lose both sons to the greed of that vile race.” Loki nods a little at that. It makes sense, sort of. He wouldn't have sacrificed _any_ of his children, he thinks. He thinks he would have left his kingdom in his wife's hands and come to stop things himself, in less than half the time and with a tiny fraction of the destruction.

Easy enough to recount should-haves and would-haves in hindsight, Loki supposes.

“You didn't tell him why the Chitauri had power over me,” he says finally, and Odin stops pacing. “You didn't tell him that they had my wife and children hostage.”

“No,” Odin agrees, resting a hand on Loki's head. “Loki, there was never any way your wife and children were going to escape that place. The Chitauri kept them alive only to manipulate you into doing their bidding.”

“No,” Loki breathes out, twitching his head away from Odin's touch. “No, they were going to let me take them home, they swore-”

“They are liars and oathbreakers,” Odin says, drawing his hand back. “They never intended to give you what you wanted, Loki. Surely you know this.”

“No, no, _no_ , you don't _understand_ -” Loki starts, hysteria threatening to turn his words into sharp, broken cries. Odin steps closer and at first Loki thinks he is going to press Loki's face against his chest, the way he did when Loki was very young, whenever he cried over hurts or injured feelings. Odin's hand goes instead to Loki's jaw, grabbing hold and squeezing slightly so that Loki cannot use it to speak.

“Listen to yourself a moment, Loki,” Odin says sternly. “Your histrionics bring you shame. You did not need that brood of monsters for the last thousand years of your life, and you do not need them now. Any feigned emotion at their passing is easily seen for what it is- a ploy to garner sympathy, to try to reduce your sentence.”

Loki whimpers, tears burning trails down his face until they meet the skin of Odin's fingers and thumb. Odin sighs and lets go, backing away.

“Thor and your mother both have permission to come here. I doubt they will, but if they do, and I hear tell of your trying to manipulate them with tales of a family that's been dead all these centuries, Loki...” Odin shakes his head, barely visible now.

“It will not go well for you,” he promises, and leaves Loki alone in the darkness again.

After a few days of nothingness- no light, no sounds, no contact with anyone outside of his cell at all- Loki hears, close to his ear and without the warmth of breath, a soft sigh.

“Don't worry,” Angrboda promises softly. “I won't leave you again.”

He knows it's not her. He knows she is dead. He knows her bones and the bones of their children were blasted into nothingness in an empty corner of space.

Laughter bubbles out of him like water from a spring, and the taste of blood is in his mouth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you weren't expecting a happy ending.
> 
> ...
> 
> jk there's a sequel.


	7. BONUS VALENTINES DAY ART

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Since it'll be a while til I start the sequel, I drew some art.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's for Valentines Day~
> 
> Angrboda likes to boop Loki.
> 
> Loki likes to be booped.
> 
> <3

 


End file.
